Google News Timeline for the Enterprise?

Google Labs recently launched a cool tool: Google News Timeline. Google Search has a comparable feature too if you know what to type in. You can use Google News Timeline to search what has been said about a certain topic, person or brand over time. This is great for companies for instance, but also for research. It helps you get a feeling for the time period the topic was hot, how much was written about the topic at a certain time, etc.

But what I was wondering is, isn't this also very interesting for inside companies as well? We all experienced old ideas coming back to life in companies over time. For some reason that great idea you had didn't really take-off. But now all of a sudden it does.

The strange thing I've seen many times is that this new interest for a topic or idea, doesn't always relate to or build on the research that was done in the past. It looks like a new idea, fresh from the start. But in reality it isn't (-- and hardly ever is). A Google News Timeline in the enterprise could help us look back, find good ideas, relate our seemingly new ideas to older ones, etc. Of course, we'd have to search in the company repositories, which doesn't happen enough. But the presentation of the search results may just trigger employees to start searching and learn from the past.

[Found via the Google Systems Blog. Thanks!]

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