Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.
Timeline Navigation
Google News Timeline provides a number of ways to navigate through time.
- Drag horizontally anywhere on the timeline to move forward or backward through results.
- Click on the arrows on the navigation bar to scroll your results, or press and hold on an arrow to continue to scroll.
- Click on an area of the timeline to zoom in and look at a shorter date range in finer detail, or simply double-click to zoom out.
Using the navigation menus
- The "Show" menu is used to select whether to see the timeline divided by a day, week, month, year or decade.
- The "Size" menu allows you to control the width of the columns, by selecting sizes of small, medium or large, to change the scale to shrink or enlarge the data on the timeline.
- If you'd like to go directly to a specific date, enter it into the "Date" field on the control bar.
Specifying date ranges
When a date is entered into the search box, the timeline will navigate to results centered on that period of time. For example, if you type "1977" into the date field, the timeline will display "January 1977" on the left side of the timeline.
The zoom level is determined automatically by the search term you enter. For example, "2002" will set the zoom level to months, while "April 2002" will set it to weeks and "April 15, 2002" will zoom by days.
Please note that the date field also recognizes phrases like today, yesterday, this week or last week, and this month or last month.
Queries and Data Sources
You can enter a query in the search box to display results for that query on the timeline. For example, you could search for "News" results for "Obama."
You can specify as many different queries as you'd like by adding additional terms and data sources.
- A few queries, like "Wikipedia Events" and "Time Magazine", are built-in by default.
- Queries can be deleted by clicking the blue delete icon.
- Drag the queries horizontally to change their order.
- Double-click a query to bring it to the top of results.
- Single-click on a query to disable it, then click on it again to display those results again.
- You can also add queries to the timeline through the "Add More Queries" link.
Types of Data Sources
Google News Timeline features search results from many different sources.
| News Sources | News results (including article snippets, images and videos) from the past 30 days or so are from Google News. Older news results are from Google News Archive Search. |
| Magazines and Newspapers | You can search for magazines and newspapers that have been digitized and are available through Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search. Images of the front covers of these publications are displayed on the timeline, based on their original publication date. |
| Blogs | You can view blog post results on the timeline by selecting "Blogs" from the data source menu and typing the name of the blog in the query field. |
| Baseball Scores | Baseball scores from Retrosheet are displayed on the timeline by selecting "Sports Scores" from the menu bar and entering the name of a team. |
| Wikipedia Events, Births, and Deaths | You can add events, births, and deaths from Wikipedia by selecting "Wikipedia" from the menu bar and entering the category you'd like displayed on the timeline. |
| Media from Freebase | You can view information from Freebase about various types of media, including books, music and movies. For example, you can display albums of a particular artist or movies featuring a specific actor. |
Frequently Asked Questions
In what Google News Language Editions is this feature currently available?
At this time, Google News Timeline features English language results and is only available for Google News users in the US.
Where do the dates and times associated with each entry come from?The dates and times for results displayed on the timeline come from their respective sources. For example, results from Google News are displayed with the date and time that they were added to or updated in News. Please refer to each source for its dating convention. We don't guarantee that dates are always correct, and are always working to improve results.
Why can't I see blog posts from earlier than 2005 in my results?The blog posts in Google News Timeline are displayed based on their date of publication. These results come from Google Reader, so we don't display results before the fall of 2005, when Google Reader was launched. Please note, blog search results may not yet include all blogs.
I see an error in the results.We appreciate your help in improving this new Labs feature. Please report any issues or concerns with the Google News Timeline at our Report an issue form. If you are a copyright holder and want to request removal of material that you believe infringes your copyright, please follow our DMCA notification instructions.
I have an idea for a new feature or type of results in the Google News Timeline. Are you interested?We're always working to improve new features, and would love to hear your suggestions. Please let our team know using our Suggest a feature form.