May 17, 2007
Google Timeline and Map Search Results Views
Just over a month ago, I posted about Visualising Geo-temporal RSS Feeds, in which I pondered on various mashup interfaces that could be used to display data contained in an RSS feed on a split view containing a timeline visualisation of the feed items, as well as a map view depicting the geo-location of each item, like this Earthquake mashup by Jörn Clausen which combines a Simile timeline with Google map:
Something I didn't really explore in that post was the application of timelines and maps to search results (the only time-based search engine I know of so far is TimeSearch, but there may be others..for the geo view, I'm not talking about local search; I'm really considering fact based searches, which may already be possible via Yahoo pipes map mashups).
Anyway, Google's recent flurry of search related announcements included a pointer to Google Experimental Search, which is to Google's Search interface what Google Labs is to applications - that is, a listing of all the stuff Google are playing with in public, but is yet to make the Google front page.
A couple of the items on the Experimental page relate closely to geo-temporal visualisation, although as yet there is no split screen view. However, what there is is this....
Consider a search on english civil war battle, for instance...
Search for english civil war battle with the experimental view:timeline limit:
Search for english civil war battle with the experimental view:map limit:
When I get a chance, I'll do a split view with each of these results in a separate iframe, driven from the same original search query. [UPDATE: here it is - Google maps'n'timelines side-by-side]
What would be handy, of course, would be an RSS version of these results, with the geo- and temporal data explicitly included somewhere. The aforementioned "geo-temporal feeds" post mentions a couple of (probably not very good) ideas for carrying the temporal data by usurping each item's posting time to carry the date the result applies to - such as the date of the first moon landing for a search on that term* - rather than the time the query was made, or the timestamp of the page returned as a result, for example.
I don't know if the Google SOAP interface is still working for those of us who have keys (I haven't checked for a bit), but if it does, I wonder if these search limits work with it?
*Hmm - I wonder if the view:map interface will end up displaying results using http://moon.google.com/ or http://google.com/mars if they are more relevant?! (It doesn't appear to at the moment - I checked ;-)
Posted by ajh59 at May 17, 2007 09:37 PM