ResearchBuzz

Late last month Google announced a couple fun products in Google Labs, one for Google Images and one for Google News.

Google Images now has a “similar images” search at http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/. Search for an image (you don’t have to restrict yourself to the ones on the front page) and you’ll get a page of results. Some of the results will have a “similar images” link underneath them. Click on that and you’ll get a group of images that are, well, similar.

Sometimes this will be prosaic; do a search for grizzly bear, do a similar search for the grizzy bear with his mouth open, and you’ll get a page full of grizzly bears with their mouths open, or grizzly bear head shots, or inexplicably, a moose. The fun begins when you do less-straightforward searches. I did a search for beach lightning and picked an interesting shot (clouds boiling over the ocean, a bolt of lightning) for the similar images. What I found was that the similar images didn’t appear to look for certain elements so much (like the lightning) as much as swathes of color and the horizontal and vertical arrangements of elements. The similar search found me some lightning shots, some beach sunset shots, and this great wave image from Flickr.

I would encourage you to stick to static elements, though; I did a search for exhaustion and did a similar image search for a picture of an exhausted guy lying on his back in the mud. I ended up with paint ball pictures and several renfest shots. I have no idea how. The occasional map image was thrown in. Stick to concrete subjects unless you enjoy surrealism.

The second product is Google News Timeline, up for testing at http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/. The page presents a grid of a week with news stories splashed across it. Enter a query and get very focused stories, all set up across a timeline so you can quickly browse for the highlights of a particular day. Search for H1N1 with the grid to show you weeks’ worth of stories instead of days’, and you’ll see how quickly the swine flu issue blew up in the media.

The entries on the calendar will show a headline and a snippet and sometimes a very small photograph. You can also adjust the calendar to show different size fonts. Google does seem to be featuring certain content providers, but I got search results from all over the Web when I ran a standard news timeline search.

Don’t leave yet, though. If you’ll look at the pulldown next to the query box you’ll see that you can map all kinds of things onto this calendar, including news videos, quotes, and photos. There are also more general things you can map on this calendar, like TV shows, blogs and even video games. Be careful; this can turn into a serious timesink. (Do not make me map animated cartoons onto a release calendar.)

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten really wound up about new Google Labs offerings, but these are great. Well done guys.

The American Motorcyclist Association has put a 50+ year archive of its official publication, American Motorcyclist, up online. The archive spans from 1955 to 2007 (over 630 issues!) and is available through a partnership with Google Books.

The easy way is to go to http://books.google.com and search for American Motorcyclist. If you want a direct URL, though, try this giant link, which will start you at January 1955.

All issues are available for free and are available in full format, including ads and covers. The digitizing is excellent quality though you will have to zoom in to read many of the articles (unless you have spectacular eyes.) How great to read about the upcoming 1955 Daytona Beach Classic, and the ads! I think may favorite one is the full-pager that uses Annie Oakley to sell savings bonds. (The headline: “She shot the ashes off the Kaiser’s cigaret”.)

You can do searches of individual issues, of course, but doing full-archive searches is a little more tricky. I found appending “American Motorcyclist” to my search sort of worked, but in the experimental searches I ran I never felt like I was getting a realistic number of results. Do full-archive searches with caution.

That aspect of search is disappointing, but this archive is absolutely worth a look.

The Library of Congress has announced that it has a new channel on YouTube. Though the films are going to be available at LOC.gov and American Memory, you definitely want to check out the official YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress.

At the moment the LOC has 74 videos available, divided into several playlists including videos from the 2008 National Book Festival and “Kluge Center Series: Prominent Scholars on Current Topics”. But I suspect the playlists that’ll hold your attention are the 21 early (1904) films from Westinghouse and the 20 early (1890s) films from Edison Companies. The Westinghouse videos range from a minute to six minutes long and tend to feature industrial machinery in action. The Edison Films are much shorter (between 30 seconds and a minute) and feature everything from Native American dancing to boxing cats to a strongman named Sandow doing a 56-second posedown.

If you’ve used YouTube at all, none of this is going to look unfamiliar to you. The videos are organized into easy-to-use playlists and a lot of them have gotten serious numbers of views even though the announcement for the new site was only ten days ago. Unfortunately, while this collection has reach through YouTube it doesn’t have much in the line of community — every video I looked at had comments disabled. I was very much hoping that comments would be used like they are for Flickr Commons — folks with historical information supplying background that the LOC doesn’t have in its description (or perhaps doesn’t even know about.)

The Library of Congress is also using brief bumpers before and after featured video. This is okay — they’re not really long enough to be intrusive or annoying — but they can give a surreal quality to what you’re watching, especially as the old videos are silent. “From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.” (30 seconds of boxing cats in a silent movie ensues.) “This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.”

Worth a look, but I am missing the comments.