April 17, 2008 1:45 PM PDT

Great Google quarter--and a new quote feature

Posted by Dan Farber

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Google announced a great quarter today, with net income jumping 31 percent to $1.31 billion for the first quarter, and I was equally impressed by a new feature on Google News that extracts quotes from news stories.

It comes in handy if you are looking for quotes from individuals and the sources, and you can slice and dice the quotes by relevance, date and time. However, it is a bit inconsistent right now. The two screens below shows how "words that matter" works:

Google News shows a quote at the top of the page (above), with a link that goes to a full page of news quotes (below).

I did another Google News search on "Eric Schmidt" and I got this screen, sans the quote feature:

Searching on George Bush, the quote feature worked as expected:

Searching Google News for Bill Clinton didn't yield any quotes, but a search for Yankees captain Derek Jeter did. It appears that the news quote feature needs a little more work, or that Google News has deemed its CEO as unquotable. It must be the former...

Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.

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About Outside the Lines

Dan Farber is the editor in chief of CNET News. He has covered technology for more than two decades, and he previously served as editor in chief of ZDNet, PC Week and MacWeek. Outside the Lines explores the intersection of business and technology.

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