Search and understand documents with Pinpoint

Sifting through large amounts of documents is a challenge for journalists — whether they work at a large news organization or a smaller, local one.

Pinpoint uses Google’s AI and Search technologies to help reporters quickly search through hundreds of thousands of text, audio, image and video files. This helps them find patterns in data, identify new potential stories, or easily find that quote they need from a video or audio file.

Get started with Pinpoint

1. Go to goo.gle/pinpoint
2. Select Request full access
3. Check off “I’m working in the journalism industry”

Once you have access, get started by uploading documents to a collection - they can be uploaded directly from your computer or Google Drive, and Pinpoint supports a wide variety of file types, including PDFs, images, audio, video, email archives, and more.

Search is a core functionality of Pinpoint - once you’ve added your files to Pinpoint, you can now use the full power of the Knowledge Graph to interpret your documents.

The Knowledge Graph is how Google understands the world. Using the power of Google’s Knowledge Graph, OCR and AI technology, you can quickly search through documents, images, audio recordings, and more.

Pinpoint automatically creates an index of the most commonly mentioned people, locations, and organizations, which can help you spot trends in your data.

Best practices

• Filter the index to remove documents that don't mention certain people or places
• Combine searches to find multiple terms at once
• Upload audio recordings to automatically create searchable transcripts
• Extract quotes from meeting notes
• Jump to exact positions in the audio track
• Transform scanned tables into Sheets to search, filter, and edit
• Evaluate documents by asking questions to better understand key points