Communications of the ACM
A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future
Showing news stories on a timeline has been tried before. But Time Explorer, a prototype news search engine created in Yahoo's Barcelona research lab, generates timelines that stretch into the future as well as the past.
Time Explorer's results page is dominated by an interactive timeline illustrating how the volume of articles for a particular search term has changed over time. The most relevant articles appear on the timeline, showing when they were published. If the user moves the timeline into the future, articles appear positioned at any point in time the text might have referred to.
This provides a new way to discover articles, and also a way to check up on past predictions. The timeline for 2010 becomes a way to discover a 2004 Op-Ed suggesting that by now, North Korea would have constructed some 200 nuclear warheads, or a 2007 article accurately predicting difficult policy decisions for Democrats over the expiration of George Bush's tax cuts.
From Technology Review
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Comments
Michael Lewis
Predictable secular events such as tides, ephemeris and others which are deterministic would be good base alongside the data generated from media references. Seriously, as some of the events, such as conjunctions of major planets, are significantly heavy and affect charges.
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