Web Info & Tutorials

Posted by Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer



As a teenager, history was the class in which I daydreamed -- the one that required memorization of long lists of kings, of battles, of arcane disputes that led to war. It was something I left behind when I graduated from high school and went on to the "real" things in life.



But history was not done with me. Many years later, I drifted from reading George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon to reading more about the Russian Revolution. The evolution of the Bolshevik Old Guard from scruffy revolutionaries fighting a stifling monarchy to becoming ruthless dictators for Stalin's killing machine was fascinating. History had drawn me into its web. History isn't a dry laundry list of the likes of "Ozymandias". It is what everyone in any era does, full of rich detail.



And now you can find those contemporary details (and more current ones as always) through a new archive search feature of Google News. This new feature can help you explore history through archives of news and other information sources. You can search for events, people and ideas, and see how they have been described over time. If you were to seek information on the 1969 moon landing, now you can find original coverage from that year, as well as analysis, news and commentary from the 37 years following.



Based on relevance, the archive results on Google News include freely available articles from sources such as TIME.com, The Guardian and many others, as well as snippets of articles available for a fee or via subscription. These may come from news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and also from news aggregators like AccessMyLibrary.com, ThomsonGale, Factiva, HighBeam™ Research, LexisNexis and others.



In addition to finding the most relevant articles for your query, you can get an historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. Articles related to a single story or theme within a given time period are grouped together to enable you to see a broad perspective on the events. The archive search results include articles about an incredibly wide variety of topics, people and events over the last 200 years or so. About kings and battles, yes, but also about athletes and games, political dramas, crimes, romances and much, much else.



History is often presented to us with a viewpoint many years after it happens -- and it's frequently smoothed over in many ways, and for many reasons. Here's hoping archive search in Google News can help you read about history as it has unfolded, and explore and understand the past for yourself.

I'd like to share this earth-shattering news with you: David Hasselhoff (of Knight Rider and Baywatch fame) has come out with a classic new music video that should not be missed. How did I find out about it? I saw a dynamically generated link to it from Google Related Links at the bottom of my blog. (And I've found some other gems that way that have to wait for another post.)



Let me give you what the MBAs call the 8-second elevator pitch (our buildings are not very tall around here) on Google Related Links. The idea is you surf over to http://www.google.com/relatedlinks/ and start creating a Google Related Links unit for your site. You pick the color, size, and types of content (related news, videos, searches, web pages) that you want to appear in this Related Links unit, and then copy the JavaScript over to your site just as you would do for an AdSense ad unit. Google crawlers will then crawl your site, see what type of content is there, and then dynamically show links in the unit that relate to your site.







While Google Related Links don't give you revenue directly, you can use them to keep your site fresh and interesting without any maintenance. Happy visitors mean repeat visits. And if you're feeling especially creative, try alternating between Google ads and Google Related Links in a given space on your page. This will encourage people to look in that space for interesting dynamic content.



Oh, and by the way, you're more than welcome to click the links in a Google Related Links unit on your own site. Happy surfing!



Posted by Shannon Bauman - Product Manager for Google Related Links