Just two days after Microsoft released a Google News competitor, Google has upped the ante by adding a useful new feature to their popular news site: Quotations. Google announced today that it is now augmenting searches for newsworthy names with recent quotes by those people. The quotes are pulled from news stories as quickly as Google News indexes them, which makes the new service a sort of near-real time version of Bartlett’s Quotations. Quotes are organized by person and then made searchable.
“Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts – transcriptions of actual words and thoughts – be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions,” wrote Google engineers Jack Hebert, Akash Nanavati and Natasha Mohanty in a blog post.
After searching for a name, if Google News has a recent, relevant quote from that person it will display it in a box above the news results. Below is a screenshot of results when searching for “Tiger Woods.”
Clicking on the name brings you to a page of quotations by that person. The Tiger Woods page is dominated by quotes about his performance at the Masters golf tournament last weekend and his unexpected knee surgery. Quotes can be ordered by date or relevance, and sorted by time (month, week, day, or hour), in much the same way as news results.
Users can then search in quotes to drill down to specific topics. For example, here is a page of quotes from US President George W. Bush about Iraq. Google News Quotes is smart enough to assign titles and nicknames to the correct people. A search for “George W. Bush” yields the same page of quotes as a search for “President Bush,” for example.
