Mountain View, California — Google’s Labs team has been busy applying together some great new search technology lately. Back in April the Labs team initially introduced it for select images only alongside the visual-news timeline, and now the Similar Images feature has graduated from Labs and become a permanent part of Google Image Search.
Similar Images now caters as the first major feature in Google Labs that has taken the big leap into becoming a permanent feature of Google Search. The most famous images in Google’s search results will have a link to “find similar images,” links below most of the results: clicking it gives you a pretty accurate collection of images of the same subject.
“So, for instance, you want to find images of Ancient Egypt,” says Google. “Google Images will supply you with a rich variety of results, including pyramids, maps, relics, drawings and other types of images. Instead of poring through hundreds of images, now you can simply click ‘Find similar images‘ to narrow down the results to the results to the type you want.”
These days, image searches somewhat looks a bit more like this: Note the lilac-colored links under most images. This feature empowers the users for narrowing results to specific people, objects, poses, angles, or even identical images posted on different sites.
Additionally, with the introduction of a dedicated Similar Images search page that provides identical results to what is now found in the standard version of Google Images search, the company has also developed a standalone Google Product Ideas page to collect user feedback for other features or changes to the image search service.
This is a place where Google users can enter comments that will be viewed by Google’s Images team, as well as giving others the chance to vote ideas up or down. This will possibly remain in place, as has been the case for sites of other Google Labs graduates, such as Google Transit (now a part of Maps) and Google Suggest.
Similar pages are already available for iGoogle, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Mobile, Custom Search, Google Apps, SketchUp, Google Health, and SideWiki. If you have any creative ideas on how to improve Google products better, but are unsure of how to go about delivering the message to the company, these are good places to start.
Also note that Similar Images is being rolled out gradually, so there is a good chance that you may not be able to see it instantly. Rest assured, however, you will.