I’m still thinking about search engines and searching as I always do, but there has been so much news the last couple of days about The Indictment that I’ve been thinking about searching that.

The indictment is fairly long and mentions several time spans and specific dates. As I was reading through it, I started wondering about external news context for the events in the indictment. People and events related to this indictment have been very much in the public eye, and coverage of that has been occurring in parallel with the secret things that were alleged to be happening. I wanted a way to be able to review all those dates and that topic through a Google News search lens without lots of typing.

So I made Google News Timeline Template!

Enter the Google News search query you want to run and a series of date spans separated by commas. GNTT will turn that query and those dates into a series of Google News search links which open in a new tab.

I must say testing this was very interesting. The indictment alleges that boxes were being moved around Mar A Lago in April 2021. Of course when I run a Google News search for that topic in that same time period, boxes full of classified documents are not mentioned. But events happening at Mar A Lago are.

In addition to time spans, the indictment also mentions specific dates, like July 21, 2021. At that date it is alleged that classified documents were shown to people who should not have seen them. Again, doing a Google News search around that time period is not going to find that incident. But what’s this about the security of nuclear footballs, in news stories that were published about the same time? Yikes.

I’ve been playing around a lot with how date-bounded searches can provide context to more general information. This is the first time I’ve applied that thinking to situations where there is a known layer and an unknown layer. Since both layers occurred in physical space, you can apply contextual boundaries to both and then compare them. I wonder what we will find?