Old News

It occurred to me when writing my last post that I had given it a hidden expiration date, since I know already that one of the links is only going to work only for a limited time. The perspicacious among you will know which one I mean. Yep, it’s the link to Google News under the anchor text “minor hype frenzy”. The nature of a hype frenzy is such that you can’t really sum it up in a link to a single news story, so using Google New’s search results was a seeming no-brainer. The problem is that, news being news, these results will shift over time, and a visitor trawling my blog archives a month from now (implausible, I know, but I’m trying to make a point here) might click on the link and get no results at all. Some frenzy.

This set me to thinking, and I came up with a brilliant idea: a time-based search feature. This would be similar in concept to the location-based searches provided by Google Local. The latter lets you type in a location and some search terms and spits out a list of places you might find what your looking for. Handy when you’re in downtown Manhattan and have a hankering for deep-fried fish heads.

Google Time would let you do the same for a specific time period. So I could publish a link to the aforementioned “hype frenzy” query but provide extra criteria so that the results are constrained to web pages existing on September 20th 2004. Combining this with Google News’s existing capability to restrict hits to recently published stories would open up a fascinating window to the hot new stories at any given point in time.

All of this is eminently doable, of course. So doable, in fact, that someone has already done it. I’ve known about the Wayback Machine for a while as a way to look at a snapshot of a particular website at a particular time. Now it appears that they’ve added a full-text search feature called “Recall”, although when I tried it I got an unsatisfyingly blunt “connection refused” message. In any case, they’re not going to have all of those cool features for searching images, news articles, and so on. But the idea is spot on. Any chance Google could snap these guys up before my link time bomb explodes?

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