14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s search engine is the most used in the world, but the company keeps trying to make things better for users everywhere. With the new timeline view for the Knowledge Graph, that’s exactly what the Internet giant is trying to do.
A brand new experiment over at Google is turning the already-useful Knowledge Graph into a full-out historical timeline.
For a query into the past of a company or something of a historical nature, such as the World War, for instance, Google will return a list of important chronological events from Wikipedia articles.
All you have to do is perform the search and you should see the new useful information at the top of the page. Keep in mind, however, that the feature is experimental and not everyone can play with it just yet. However, it might not be too long before this is possible and the timeline view becomes something attached to most queries.
By default, the search engine will only highlight some of the important events, but you’ll be able to mouse over all of them and read a synopsis on each of these items, as well as images, relevant dates and pieces from Wikipedia articles. Clicking on any of these will perform an additional Google search, returning even more information about it.
Google has chosen to make it easy to navigate the timeline by adding colors and parallel axis to better distinguish between the various types of information added to the mix. However, at this point, the way the timeline looks isn’t really fit for everyone to use.
Unlike the nice design and easy to use interface offered in other type of Knowledge Graph versions, the one offered for this timeline looks aged and rather hard to use by all users. While the idea is really good and can be extremely helpful in most cases, it needs a simpler interface for when the feature becomes publicly available for everyone.
The Knowledge Graph was introduced by Google back in 2012 in an effort to deliver relevant information to users straight from the search results pages. The move was one of Google’s main steps towards being more than a search engine that returns links to pages it indexed with information about the things you look for.
The Knowledge Graph has since taken many shapes and varied from displaying info at the top of the page to letting you know more details about a certain company on the right side of the page.
