Google on Monday reintroduced Google Labs, its launch pad for new Web services, and committed itself to push the quirky Web innovations out the door more quickly."This is reviving the notion of launch early and launch often," said R.J. Pittman, Google's director of product management.
As part of the Labs' second rollout, the company unveiled improvements to the way users search for images and a news timeline developed by Andy Hertzfeld, a programming legend who helped write the software for the first Apple Macintosh.
As an increasing number of digital images are posted to the Web, engineers have struggled to create meaningful ways to organize them so people can find the pictures they're looking for by
typing terms into a search engine like Google.
The problem, said Radhika Malpani, director of engineering, is that "a picture really is worth a thousand words." So if someone is trying to find a certain image of a rocky beach, it's not particularly helpful to type words like "beach on rock" into Google. The new image search tries to solve the problem by letting users click on a "similar images" link. If an initial search returns an image that's similar to the one a person has in mind, he or she can use the link to dive deeper into the Web.
The Google News Timeline tackles the problem of visually representing the past several hundred years of news events. The timeline draws on licensed sources like Time magazine covers and scanned newspapers, as well as baseball scores and Wikipedia articles available in the public domain to create a visual news timeline of everything from New York City architecture to Mexican history.
Information can be sorted by the day, week, month, year or decade and includes events dating back to the 15th century
Google Labs has been a stand-alone Web site since 2002, serving as a test bed for products like Google Street View, Google Translate and Picasa facial recognition. It was supposed to be a place to fine-tune interesting ideas that weren't quite ready for prime time. But the site received little traffic and didn't offer an easy way for users to provide feedback.
The new site, at http://www.googlelabs.com/, is built to foster a community, said Michael Cohen, a Google product manager. It encourages users not only to comment on ideas, but to vote products up or down, increasing or decreasing their chances of moving out of the beta testing phase and onto Google's main platform.
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