Google Improves: News Timeline, Image Search

Google this week launched two new services, courtesy of the engineers over at Google Labs.

The company today announced the addition of Similar Images to its Image Search features. Designed to help us narrow down our searches even further, Similar Images is aimed at image searches that could throw up more than one result. Google gives the example that searching for “jaguar” would throw up both cats and cars. Those looking for the latter can click any one of the “similar images” links under the images displayed and immediately eliminate pictures of jaguar cats and swap in more pictures of Jaguar cars.

Along with the new image search tool, Google also announced News Timeline, which endeavors to organize results chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. By allowing you to navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or to just include a specific time period (i.e., 1995), you can cut out the fluff results you don’t want, with Google only showing more relevant news reports and data.

While it’s not unusual to hear about new additions to Gmail Labs -- a place where the Gmail team can quickly test tons of applications at the same time, without the need for userwide implementation -- the number of features listed in Google Labs is much smaller. Google has also announced a couple of changes to Google Labs, making it easier to search and try out the applications listed. Check it out at its new URL, www.googlelabs.com.