Google Labs has come up with two new excellent features “Similar Images” and “Google News Timeline” that will make our searches more efficient.

Google Labs hosts many applications that were developed through Google’s "20 percent time” policy, where Googlers can work 20 percent of their time on any project they wish. Some of the novel projects that came of Google Labs are Google Maps, iGoogle and Google News.

This two new features will most likely be implemented with existing Google Images search and Google News search.

How does “Similar Images” work?

Just like when you search a term, Google recommends similar terms to aid your search, this “Similar Images” work similarly, and helps you find the right image among thousands and thousands of images.

For example suppose if you search for “jaguar” image, you will either get the actual cat as well as the Jaguar car. You will get search results like the following:

But if you wanted just one of them, then click the “Similar images” link you see below the images to get the same type of images.

But if you want only the car images then click either the “Similar images” link or click this one.

This “Similar images” search will be very useful when you are trying to narrow down your choices.

The video explains this feature.

Another feature Google Labs introduced was “Google News Timeline”.

Google blog states the following about this new feature:

Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (i.e., "1977").

Here is one example when you search “Steven Spielberg” in movies, you will find a time line as shown in this link.

The Google News Timeline has some bugs in it, so the results are not perfect but it gives a rough idea about the search subject.

For now these two features are available in Google App Engine but later I am sure they will be incorporated in the main Google search.

Check it out and leave comments whether you find these two features useful or not.