Google's Timeline feature in beta
It's been in beta for quite some time -- more than a year already. But Google's Timeline feature, currently part of Experimental Search, is an interesting technology that might someday make its way to mainstream search.
The timeline parameter is meant to show search results sorted by time period. So for example, let's say I want to find information on the computer chip maker Intel. In my search box, I'll type:
When I click on a year, it takes me to results sorted by year. It extracts these results from each page. Pretty cool, huh? Google's explanation says it works best for people, companies, events, and places.
From a marketing and PR standpoint, if Timeline ever gets rolled out as a mainstream feature in Google, it could change the way we think of search results and SEO. It instantly becomes easy for someone to look back at your company's history and see what was being written about you in the past. That might be a good thing, but it could also be a bad thing if you have something to hide. With this new "time dimension" to search, it instantly becomes harder to bury bad publicity you may have received a while back through search engine optimization. A simple timeline search could turn up the page you were trying to keep quiet.
Right now Google's Timeline feature isn't quite ready for prime time. Although it's pretty good, there are still plenty of problems with Google recognizing dates, or figuring out that a company name on that page isn't relevant to a date. For example, let's look at Intel again, but let's take a peek into the company's distant past...800 years ago! When you set the filter to the date range 1200-1300, you still get a ton of results (see full-size screenshot):
In the top result from Wikipedia, Intel created a chip called the 1201, and Google thinks 1201 is a year. Then the third result is from a court case in 2002, but the PDF happened to have the number 1200 included on one of the pages. Oops.
I don't know how Google will figure out how to differentiate dates from numbers. It seems like a big obstacle for timeline search. But if it's a high enough priority, I'm sure Google can find a way to do it, and make timeline search a mainstream tool.
The timeline parameter is meant to show search results sorted by time period. So for example, let's say I want to find information on the computer chip maker Intel. In my search box, I'll type:
intel view:timelineAnd it shows me results sorted by year (see full-size screenshot).
When I click on a year, it takes me to results sorted by year. It extracts these results from each page. Pretty cool, huh? Google's explanation says it works best for people, companies, events, and places.
From a marketing and PR standpoint, if Timeline ever gets rolled out as a mainstream feature in Google, it could change the way we think of search results and SEO. It instantly becomes easy for someone to look back at your company's history and see what was being written about you in the past. That might be a good thing, but it could also be a bad thing if you have something to hide. With this new "time dimension" to search, it instantly becomes harder to bury bad publicity you may have received a while back through search engine optimization. A simple timeline search could turn up the page you were trying to keep quiet.
Right now Google's Timeline feature isn't quite ready for prime time. Although it's pretty good, there are still plenty of problems with Google recognizing dates, or figuring out that a company name on that page isn't relevant to a date. For example, let's look at Intel again, but let's take a peek into the company's distant past...800 years ago! When you set the filter to the date range 1200-1300, you still get a ton of results (see full-size screenshot):
In the top result from Wikipedia, Intel created a chip called the 1201, and Google thinks 1201 is a year. Then the third result is from a court case in 2002, but the PDF happened to have the number 1200 included on one of the pages. Oops.
I don't know how Google will figure out how to differentiate dates from numbers. It seems like a big obstacle for timeline search. But if it's a high enough priority, I'm sure Google can find a way to do it, and make timeline search a mainstream tool.
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