Google, in an attempt to win over journalists around the world, has launched a new set of tools, aimed at making the profession just a tad bit easier. This suite includes some already existing tools, but that’s not we are here for. The highlights of today’s announcements are two new tools: Pinpoint and the Common Knowledge Project.
Pinpoint:
If you are a journalist, or someone who usually has to search through hundreds of PDFs and documents just for data compilation, chances are, you aren’t a fan of the process. Sure, ‘Ctrl+F’ works, but even for that, you have to manually open up each document, and search for different keywords with the same meaning. Well, not anymore.
With Pinpoint, journalists will be able to leverage Google Search and its A.I.-powered Knowledge Graph, along with optical character recognition and speech-to-text technologies, to make the searching process easier.
Just search for something in Pinpoint, and not only will it automatically search out the exact word from a collection of documents, but it will also do the additional task of searching out synonyms. This way, you can make sure that all the highlights you are looking for are covered.
Pinpoint is available for journalists, and all you have to do is sign up. However, as of yet, it only supports 7 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Common Knowledge Project:
Unlike Pinpoint, this tool is still in beta, allowing journalists to present information in a visual medium through the use of charts. The company claims that users can build their chats from billions of public data points, correlating to different fields, including Economy, Health, Education, Crime and more.
All you have to do is enter a location (where you want your data to be based upon), add in a metric, pick a source and a category and the tool will automatically convert that into a graph for you. It’s as simple as that. The tool is still in testing, and Google is seeking the help of journalists to make it better.
