Yesterday, Google (GOOG) introduced “A Google A Day” –a game that produces a question a day and encourages users to solve the puzzle using Google’s search engine.  I’m not a crossword puzzle type but I imagine some people find this interesting.  Obviously, it encourages people to use Google’s search engine -which is clearly beneficial to Google both in short term search query gains as well as long term habitual searching.

One thing that did stand out is this: The Google-A-Day search engine is a snapshot of the search engine for that day.

You are searching Deja Google – A wormhole inspired time machine that enables you to solve today’s puzzle spoiler free by searching the Internet as it existed before A Google a Day launched.

Now this is interesting.

For those of us covering the news, this can be a pretty useful tool.  For instance, if I want to find out about the Cisco-Flip relationship in regards to the news today that Cisco was disolving its Flip unit, I could do a Google or Bing search on the matter.  Because search engines populate recent information to the top of results, almost all of my results are today’s news.

However, if I do a A-Google-A-Day search, I get the results without all of today’s news thrown in.

That’s useful!

More on Fortune:

• Google-ITA approval clears path for Kayak IPO
• Larry Page’s report card one week in