Similar Images, News Timeline and Google Labs relaunched
Today Google introduced a brand new Google Labs -- the place where you can find experiements some of the engineers at Google have been working on in their 20% time. In the past couple years, there haven't been many new products launched under Google Labs, but this could be a sign that they are bringing it back (hopefully!).
In the new Google Labs, they have released an experimental image search tool that lets you find similar images. It's not available for every image on Google Images, but there are definitely lots that you can try the feature out with.
Similar Images doesn't rely on visual cues to figure out if an image is similar to another (like.com does it this way) -- it has a wealth of meta data on images that has been collected using services like the Google image matching game called Google Image Labeler.
The second new feature that was also launched today is a new way to view news stories over time. Basically it's a draggable timeline of news headlines from the sources you specify.
I personally have an issue with things that are horizontally displayed -- they are fun to develop, but I'm still not convinced that viewing data like this in real life scenarios is easier.
What do you think of Google's two newest experiments?