Google has a new search idea that lays out results on a timeline or a map. In their page on experimental search features they say

“See results on a timeline or map. With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places.”

The syntax to see your query results on a timeline or map is simple and intuitive, just include a qualifier view:timeline or view:map. If you include both you don’t get a 4D temporal-spacial view (you wish!) but get the timeline view. The timeline view includes a simple widget that shows the relative results laid out on the timeline. Clicking on a part of the line jumps to the appropriate results. In the map view, results are place on a Google map. Check out the results of a search for “semantic web” using the timeline or map views.

Here are some things we noticed about the time and map views.

• Only a few results are returned. For example, a search on “semantic web” normally returns over 19M results, but the time and map views show just over 40. Google finds 171M results for Iraq, but will only show around 60 in the time and map views. Since this is an experimental feature, it may be that the number of results will be increased if it makes it out of the lab.
• There’s still a semantic gap. While Google has introduced a useful feature, the relationship between the search topic and the dates and places is still not refined. The time, for example, is not the time the Web document was published, but a time that appears somewhere in the document. I suspect, but have not tried to verify, that the time or place reference has to be close to the search term. Even so, there may be no relationship between them and, if there is, we are not sure what it is. Of course, refining this will be computationally expensive and probably not appropriate for a general, Web-scale search engine.
• The timeline and map views only work on the main search and not on news, blogs, images, etc.

These are great features and I hope that they are improved and make it into regular service.

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