14 DAY TRIAL // Google has released an interesting new feature for its real-time search, which enables users to ‘travel through time’ and see what people were saying about any topic at any point in history. Well, in a rather short history, they can only go as far back as February 2010, not exactly ancient times even by Internet standards. In the future though, they will be able to go all the way back to March 2006 when Twitter was launched.
“Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful,” Dylan Casey, Google’s Product Manager for Real-Time Search, wrote. “Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and ‘replay’ what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter.”
The feature will be rolled out for the English version of the site over the next few days. When it becomes available, you will be able to access it by selecting the Updates filter under Show Options. This will bring up the real-time search results page, displaying the latest and most relevant tweets. It is also enabled with the redesigned Google homepage and search results page currently in testing.
However, on top of the search results, there is now a timeline graph showing the volume of activity relating to a query over time. You can zoom in and out of a particular date and time, see what people were saying a couple of hours ago or get the general feel for an entire month. Real-time may be about what’s happening now, but there is value in knowing what happened at an earlier date, how the social dynamics influenced the spread of a news story or how an event was perceived by the world at large.