Google Blogoscoped

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Google News Archive Onebox

Now that’s an interesting new type of onebox results: Barry Schwartz found out – while googling for his name – that Google presents results from their new Google News Archive search below web search results. This type of bottom onebox with an hourglass icon is headed “News archive results for barry schwartz” and presents three different news results, from the years 1983 (NYT), 1994 (Washington Post) and 2001 (Rocky Mountain News). The links only appear on the first page of the results.

I don’t know what triggers this onebox, which also appears for queries like George Bush or Iraq, but I suppose it’s related to how often a term appears in news headlines*. What’s a bit confusing (and possibly an error on Google’s part) is that clicking on distinct news headlines won’t take you to the actual article, but yet another set of search results from the Google News Archive... you then need to locate the headline again and click it (and in some cases, pay to get the actual full content).

Note that the Google News onebox itself is a bit older, showing headlines from the past hours (sometimes on image searches, too). When you search for e.g. Iraq you’ll get a onebox showing recent news above the web results, and an archived news onebox below them.

Previously, Google released their Google News Archive Search.

*Here are some queries not triggering a news archive onebox (though some of these trigger a regular Google News onebox):
test, usa, hello, barbra streisand, war, peace, catch me if you can, bush, breaking news, hollywood, robert redford, angela merkel, osama bin laden.

Here are queries that do trigger this onebox:
iraq, george bush, tony blair, saddam hussein, hitler.

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