Google has launched test editions of refinements to its image and news searches. While potentially useful, they appear to have some teething problems.

The firm says the two new features, which are part of Google Labs, were developed as part of its program to allow employees to spend 20 percent of their work time on projects of their own choosing, even if they are outside their usual job remit.

Similar Images is designed to get round the limitations of searching for a picture by keywords. As Google’s Radhika Malpani says, “Image search is an inherently hard problem to solve because it is a visual problem and explains why people say an image is worth a thousand words because it is so difficult to describe.”

Image search results will now come with a link to allow users to find other images which are visually similar. The main example Google gives is a user who has searched for ‘jaguar’ and gets results of both the animal and the motor vehicle. Clicking on ‘Similar images’ underneath the animal filters the results appropriately. The site also suggests the feature could be used to search for stores selling a particular style or color of clothing.

However, several sites have noted that the feature appears to rely heavily on colors when making visual comparison. This means its much less accurate with black and white images.

Meanwhile another feature, Timeline, arranges results of a Google News search in historical order. There’s a wide range of settings here, letting users choose a style of news (such as headlines, quotes, or sports reports), select individual publications, and choose a historical period.

It’s a fascinating tool, and one that could easily eat up several hours of the working day for news junkies. (I had to tear myself away from the “one more search” effect to finish this post.) The only downside is that at the moment the tool seems to struggle to filter relevance as well as the standard news search, so you’ll get a lot of results which merely contain an off-handed reference to your search term.

Confusingly the tool also fills in any time periods (days, months, years or decades depending on your settings) with no relevant results by listing major news stories of the time. Though these can be distinguished (the results have a link to the original story), it is a little confusing at first.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 11:44 am under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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