Breaking down Google's new timeline feature for real time search

A little while ago, after a day buried in work stuff, and a night pondering how to make this site ‘fit’ with the online world (when it evolves from being a chaotic dumping ground of sporadically interesting plugins, features, styles, naked code and other such silliness into something more elegant, stylish and with any luck – profitable)  I had a thought.

How cool it would be, postulated my (incessantly disruptive) internal narrator, if someone smarter than me were to design a web app that could take a keyword or phrase and display search results in a timeline against sites returning the same keywords – highlighting where your own site fell into the mix time-wise, and in terms of content.

Content comparison would be made by way of a ‘Similarimeter’ – comparing text of each indexed source and rating how similar your site was to others featuring your search term.

Linking could even be displayed (that’s the weird polygon thing in the pic) showing which of the returned sites links to which.

Knowing the way the web works, it’s quite likely such a beast exists already – and Google have been displaying timelines with News site references for a while now – but clearly my idea is better. That doesn’t mean, however, that Google are resting on their laurels when it comes to tracking what’s going on in the land of the interwebs.

Today, they announced via the Official Google Blog the rollout of a ‘replay’ option for their realtime search. Now, it looks a lot like what I had in mind, though it is restricted to updates from the ‘real-time’ web. So being the tinkerer that I am, I thought I’d take a look.

It didn’t work.

In theory, that’s because I’m in Australia – we seem to be waiting for a lot of features from our pals in the other hemisphere. So having established it was broken, I thought I’d go about finding a way to fix it.

Here’s the results of my (failed) search

And the results as per an example from Google’s Blog (with search term changed)

Now, Google did mention (further on in the post than I got to before I started playing) that

The replay feature is rolling out now and will be available globally in English within the next couple days (if you want to try it now, try out this special link). For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006.

What I found interesting was that the example links they provided earlier in the post seemed much more complicated than the ‘special’ link they provided. So I broke that apart to. When time allows, I’ll be returning and providing descriptions for each of these ‘portions’ of a Google search URL.

In the meantime, in an awesome display of one of Google’s other recent announcements – you can finish the job for me.