Google just unveiled its latest innovation – a News Timeline, which provides short bursts of news from a variety of sources in a chronological grid. You start with Time and Wikipedia as your default sources but you add to those from a smattering of other sources (Rolling Stone blogs to the Vegetarian Times to sports scores), photos, books and more.

Google’s news sources include stories from Google News Search, recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, such as music albums and movies. 

You can set a digest for daily news or, say, check out the news on the day you were born (or in other words, spend a lot more time playing with this than you probably really want).

Some of the source materials are kind of sparse, for example, newspaper choices. But if you’re looking for a quick fix on select news sources or a historical search for a particular date or subject, you could find yourself doodling over the timeline.