Google had quite a busy day today, launching two new, and in my opinion, extremely useful features in Google Labs. The first is called Similar Images, and basically it lets you narrow your image searches to like items, colors, styles, etc with just the click of a button. The second is called Google News Timline, and it organizes news articles chronologically and lets you search for articles on a specific topic during a specific time period. It would seem that both of these features have the potential to be huge time savers, and both are directly related to Google Search, showing that despite its ambitious expansion, Google is first and foremost a search engine.
You can learn more about Similar Search and Google News Timline over at the Official Google Blog (which is on Blogger of course).
See...Google might not be so evil after all
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Wow! Talk about living in the age of information. First...my thoughts on the Google News Timeline.
ReplyDeleteThis is a major information overload in my mind. It would be awesome if you go there looking for a specific thing but in terms of the way I am going to view my news...no way. Wow there is a lot occurring in one day. Incredibly interesting but much more of a researching tool rather than a news consuming tool. Maybe that's what they intended it to be. In that case, success!
Similar Images. Also very cool. Not that I haven't seen this before but as my buddy Gary Vaynerchuk says..."BRAND BRAND BRAND." Google has created a brand and when they slap their name on something that five other sites have done before, I am going to use it. They have created the most efficient, fun to use, all around GOOD search engine and I will use it for everything involving my search....including my search for an "extra large red face in london."
Second point to that is that it needs to allow for the user to specify what they want to search for. What if I want to find someone in London holding a coffee cup. It needs to be able to let me do that.
I think we can definitely expect to see both of these move out of the "Lab" at some point. Very cool.
I think Google Labs is quite an interesting set up for google, giving people the chance to try out new applications before they're up and running. In particular this two new programs seem very interesting. Similar images is nice, I even tried it out on the Google Labs website, but it does produce incredibly similar pictures and I'm not sure who needs 20 of almost the identical picture. The example they use with jaguar, I would assume someone would narrow done their search with "animal" or "car" attached. Google News Timeline is a very interesting program and brings about a new view of news searching. In reality its not much different than the typical news search, this one just allows the user to see the results in a timeline fashion and sift through the dates much quicker and easier. I really like the layout and I think it has definite potential. Overall very interesting article. I like the new programs and am interested to see what google labs will come up with next.
ReplyDeleteThe Google Timeline for news is really amazing and quite beautiful! It's obviously "slanted" to the past few years (if you click on "decade" view and go back in time, you pretty much get nothing except Time Magazine and Wikipedia articles). However, for the present it's a wonderful visualization tool. For us cultural historians, we have a lot of work to do in order to provide better HISTORICAL content.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you can embed these time-stamped news feeds into maps? Would be cool to search by time/place for news...
I'm kind of in love with the concept of similar images. I've thought about how this might exist someday in the future, but I guess it wasn't that farfetched of an idea. I mean I assumed it existed on some level. Just not mainstream to the point where it's actually useful for searching a wide archive of photos. I haven't gotten to play around with it much yet, but I'm really excited. This is basically a fangirl post, what can I say.
ReplyDeleteAs far as use goes, I've messed around on photoshop enough to find this very usefull. Sometimes you just need a photo of an object, but at a different angle. Or a similar photos just larger or higher resolution. I'm sure there are much MUCH grander applications for such a tool, but that's what I'm excited about. It just makes it that much easier to narrow down google image searches.
So I just randomly searched funyuns in similar images (an empty bag was sitting on my desk) and I clicked similar images for a random picture of a twisted funyun. The results? A page of Virgin Mary's. Is this actually based off similar images or is this another tag search? Maybe the funyuns really did look like the Virgin Mary...you can decide for yourself if you want.
ReplyDeletehttp://similar-images.googlelabs.com/images?q=funyuns&qtype=similar&tbnid=ZdhK090mWU-qYM&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfunyuns&tprev=/images%3Fq%3Dfunyuns
I find Goggle Labs kinda interesting because while Google has so many products, not many of them are known popularly. It makes me think that Google is trying to expand its domain too much too fast. If Google fails in halfheartedly pushing these side products, they will definitely suffer financially. However, I think it’s good that they have these products and the products are not very popular. To me, it means that Google cannot easily gain a near monopoly on popular internet services, and it also means that there will also be competition (in the form of at least Google) to provide such services. I believe such 'capitalism', if you will, helps keep 'internet democracy' alive.
ReplyDelete