Latest innovation from Google Labs – News Timeline

Ajith | Apr 2009 | Miscellaneous, News Analysis

Google Labs is one of the coolest places for those who are in love with the latest on Web 2.0, web gadgets and innovations around the search. It’s really amazing to see how Google has exploited the search meta information to bring it to newer dimensions (Google Insights, Trends etc) and business models (AdWords, AdSense…).

The latest innovation from the Google Labs is what they call the Google News Timeline. I am not a big fan of Google News as such but this one looks really cool. With Google News Timeline, you can see all the news that you want datewise in a simple user interface which is highly customizable.

The mark of every Google Labs project is simplicity and ease of access and Google Timeline is so good at that as well. When it comes to customizing, you can add your custom queries, news search items, blog news etc to the timeline which makes it even better than typical news bars or even RSS readers in terms of readability. You may check out Google News Timeline to experience the latest means of reading news.

Google Similar Images

Yet another Google Labs innovation that is made available recently is the Google Similar Images with which you have the possibility of visually refining your search. This means that one doesn’t have to go through several pages of image SERPs before retrieving the image that he/she wants. Basically, every search result page on Similar Images comprise of groups of related images (with visual similarity) by clicking on which you get further related groupings. Crawling and indexing these images may not be a big issue but scanning them to ‘visually group‘ them probably involves some technology.

Behind most of the things that Google innovates (and makes money), it’s simply the search index pages and actual search data. Did anyone else think of leveraging that raw data to these heights?

Let us wait for what has to come next from Google Labs!