Google introduced a newly redesigned version of Google Labs today and a couple of new labs to go along with it. They rebuilt Google Labs from scratch with Google App Engine and moved it to GoogleLabs.com.
The first new lab is called “Similar Images,” and it is something of an extension to Google Image Search, although it is not being implemented there just yet as far as I can tell. What it does is allow you to search for images using pictures instead of words. You just click on an image and you are taken to results that are more closely related to that image.
For example, a search for “paris” might turn up results for the Eiffel Tower, a map of Paris France, and Paris Hilton. If you wanted to see more of Paris Hilton (assuming you didn’t just search for Paris Hilton), you could simply click the picture of her and get more.
This could potentially be useful for refining searches that aren’t necessarily able to be specified as well with words. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft Live Image Search has had a similar feature since late last year.
The second lab is similar to something that’s already being integrated into a Google product. That is the Google News Timeline. We reported last week that Google News was showing an article timeline in search results, and when you click on a story, it shows related stories in the order in which they were crawled.
The lab goes a bit further than the simple box included on the Google News site though. Google explains:
Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (i.e., “1977”). To see this in action, check out the results viewed by month in the
summer of 2006.
Google News Timeline can present results from lots of different sources, including both recent and archival news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, and sports scores and media like music and movies. You can view multiple sources simultaneously, allowing each source to lend context to the others. Try out some of our favorite queries like [ jack nicholson movies], [ barack obama quotes ], and [ baseball news photos]. To read more, check out our post on the Google News Blog .
For those who wish to closely follow updates and new additions to Google Labs, the new site comes with an RSS Feed as well as an iGoogle gadget. You can also continue reading Murdok because we almost always cover this stuff.
