San Francisco — Search engine Goliath Google Inc., perhaps anxious to feed its users with two unbaked Google Labs products, in an attempt to let users explore its latest innovation, on Monday launched two services, one for searching images and the other news, which allows Google users see news in graphical timeline, and scan for similar images they are looking for.
The fledgling new services are called Similar Images and News Timeline, released from Google Labs, a place where engineers at the California-based Internet giant get to spend time tinkering with promising innovations, are based on metadata and other information instead of optical-recognition software, which allows users to try out new features and tools as they are developed and then comment on them.
The firs one, as the name implies, empowers users the option of clicking on an image in order to narrow a search to similar pictures; the latter organizes results in news searches by timeline.
Similar Image Search:
Image processing is a tedious task for computers good at identifying a one from a zero but not a house from a tree. The ease with which humans perform such tasks has generally eluded computers.
In Similar Images, for example, a person searching for “pluto” would get images of the planet, the Disney cartoon character, and the Roman god of the underworld. Clicking on a particular image takes the user to the location of the image, as well as the option on the upper right-hand side of the screen to find similar images.
“Using visual similarity, you do not have to filter the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link of an image you like,” wrote Chuck Rosenberg, a member of the Similar Images development team. “For example, if you search for jaguar, you can use the “Similar images” link to quickly narrow your search. You might try exploring the pyramids of Egypt or discovering the Forbidden City. Or you might go shopping for an elegant evening gown or that perfect pair of shoes. So if you see an image you like, but you are stumped on how to describe it, just click the Similar Images link to see more like it.”
The image processing technology from Google and others used is not based on optical recognition, rather, Google taps its huge store of metadata and other information attached to each of the hundreds of millions of pictures in its database. Google is working on a more sophisticated understanding though, for example through face recognition in Picasa Web Albums.
On Monday, the company displayed a technology that, for a subset of images it has found on the Web, can identify similar photos. The technology works by “computing the visual distance” between two images then finding the nearest neighbors in the image database, said Radhika Malpani, the Google director of engineering who presides over image search work.
Google News Timeline, according to a blog posted by Andy Hertzfeld, a Google software engineer, enables users to organize results from Google News and other sources in new ways. The tool allows users to collect news results from current sources as well as from archived blogs, newspapers, magazines and even movies and music, Google said. The tool lets users set a time scale to get results from a specific number of days, weeks, years or decades. The scale can also be set to bring in results only from a particular year.
During a news conference at Google’s San Francisco offices to announce the new services, Hertzfeld said the purpose behind the project is to provide a visual representation of how a subject evolves over time. While results will include information from Google News, which provides breaking news, the bigger vision is to provide a user interface for Google’s database of scanned documents and images, taken with permission from libraries, newspapers, magazines, and other sources, as well as the massive amount of information on the Web.
Google News Timeline provides a way to browse history through a variety of lenses. This view shows Nobel prizes. (Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Essentially, the company said, it is a zoomable, graphical timeline of information.
Google is authorized to display complete issues of a couple of dozen magazines, such as Popular Science, and a number of newspapers. News Timeline can display historical information dating back to the 1400s. For example, searching for religion in 1450 gets Wikipedia entries on battles between France and England.
R.J. Pittman, director of product management at Google, said the new services are an attempt “to push the envelope on the user experience.” If users take to the new offerings in large numbers, then Google will dedicate more resources in developing them further.
“Launch early and launch often,” Pittman said. “There is a growing backlog of interesting things coming from Google.”
“We are trying to create awareness so people know when we are trying out new stuff,” Pittman said. “For us to be realistic about the products, to get adaptive, we have to have a fast iteration rate.”
To make it easier to collect more user feedback, Google has moved its Labs to a new Web site that is built on the Google App engine. “We actually gutted it and rebuilt it from the ground up,” Pittman said of the original Labs Web site.
The new site offers visitors the option of providing feedback to Google engineers on their projects and to rate individual services. The site also includes profiles of the engineers.