Google Squared - in Google Labs

Google Labs has a bunch of cool tools to explore. One I just discovered is Google Squared. The idea is that you type in several words of a search or topic like school, library, teacher, books, database, California, CSLA and Google Squared extracts items from the web and puts them into a spreadsheet of sorts, which you can save as a CSV file or Google Spreadsheet.

News Timeline by Google

Google is good at adding new cool tools. These are available on a special Google Labs page and people are encouraged to check them out, experiment with them. A new tool is Google News Timeline. It displays news and related search results on an interactive timeline. If you like to follow issues and look for trends, this tool seems useful. It is a mix of text and photos, drawn from TIME Magazine and Wikipedia.

COLUMNS and their search options: SHOW: day, week, month, year, decade
SIZE of news item: small, medium, large

Time Magazine covers are included, but can be eliminated. For example, if you wanted to see what was happening for a certain year, you'd see 4-5 TIME magazine covers in each month or week block, depending on what you wanted to show.

You can also enter a name, such as your own name. It was fun finding news items appear at the top of the columns that mention my name! Oct 2002 item from School Library Journal; 2007 item from WebWire.