Friday, April 18, 2008

Google News Quotes Finder

Google News added a quotes feature, they announced. Search for a name of a person, say Marissa Mayer, and above the news results you may find a gray speech bubble box showing a quote and its source. Click on the linked name below the speech bubble, and you’ll be dropped to a page listing numerous of such speech bubbles containing quotes (including the ability to search through the quotes). Like this quote by Google’s Marissa Mayer: “By gaining all those users you’ll eventually gain the attention of advertisers.”

Google News is slow to roll out new features but when they do they often look solid. This latest addition seems like it could be an incredibly useful feature. However, I wasn’t able to get this to work with the Google News archive (just the quotes from the time frame of a month), which would make it even more useful. I’m also unsure how many quotes it does find, e.g. whether it will find just quotes directly disclosed by phrases like “... Ms Mayer said,” or whether Google also locates quotes from Q&A style interviews, or those indirectly disclosed as “... she said” (the latter style was not found in a brief test I did looking for something Marissa said, though that test isn’t conclusive).

[Thanks Chuck!]

Update: As Matt Cutts points out, even (at least some) quotes of the “he said/ she said" type are found. [Thanks Matt!]

Google News Quotes Finder by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (11)

>> More posts

Advertisement