Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Google Labs: "Similar Images" and "News Timeline"

Lots of stuff going on leaving little time to blog, so this will need to be brief...
Google Labs released a couple neat new tools yesterday. (Another report here.)
One is "Similar Images" which uses the colors and shapes of one image to become the basis for a subsequent search on similar images. For example, I searched for "Jerusalem" and two clicks later on pictures that are closest to the view I want, and I have about 600 pics simply of the Temple Mount viewed from the Mount of Olives.
The other new release is Google News Timeline. It is mainly intended for more recent history, and one can specify a view (day/week/month/year/decade), a date, and then apply additional filters either by search term or news source. (Click on "Add More Queries" to include additional Wikipedia items, a number of newpapers [Pittsburgh Post and St. Petersburg Times] or magazines [Time, Baseball Digest, Popular Science, and Vegetarian Times: go figure!], and other options with varying degrees of accessible material.) It appears that one can only go back to 1400 to find material.
For more ancient events, the other option you have is to use one of the Google Labs Experimental projects and enable "Alternate views for search results."
Google also updated their Google Labs page, and you can have some fun checking out some of their other projects.

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