April 21, 2009

Today, Google’s introducing some early-stage new products and services coming out of Google Labs at a press gathering hosted by R.J. Pittman, director of product management in search properties. I’ll be live logging the hour-long press conference being held at Google’s San Francisco (and there’s more here on the Google Labs blog):

Here’s Pittman: “We’re still not exactly sure where the economy is headed. But innovation is alive and well at Google.” The challenge is keeping the innovation framework going when the company is growing so huge.

Pittman mentions several recent innovations that are intended to “catalyze the Web,” such as Street view and turn-by-turn directions, Audio Indexing, Picasa facial recognition, and Google Translate

The (innovation) garden is actually overgrown.” Lots of local opportunities getting built off Google’s overall platform. The key is getting users’ participation earlier in the food chain of product development, to get products in the hands of consumers as soon as possible. “We think it’s really important to engage the users as soon as possible.”

OK, now on to the products. First up is Radhika Malpani, director of engineering, on Similar Images. You can take a favorite query, say on Porsches, and specify the color. Now taking that further. You can do a search on Paris, say, and you get images of the city, the star, etc. Then you can choose which image for which you want more that are similar. Google looks at color, texture, and shape to determine similarity, with a little metadata (accompanying information) to help.

She shows a demo: Search on beaches, and you get a wide variety of images, most of which probably aren’t what you had in mind. So you can click on a Similar Images link under each image to get more of the same. You can keep clicking on images to get closer and closer. Hundreds of millions of images are in the database.

Pittman says they’re putting this out even before they have similar images for each image search to get quick feedback. Pittman again on another new product coming into GoogleLabs: News Timeline. This is legendary former Apple software engineer Andy Hertzfeld’s project. Hertzfeld: It’s Google’s mission to organize the world’s information, and certain information is best organized by time. That’s the purpose of this project.

The demo: It’s literally a timeline with stories listed under each date and you can scroll back and forward in time. You can also scroll up and down to get more stories. The stories include video and other rich media that plays when you click on them. And of course you can make a search and then those stories relevant to those queries show up. “It’s a visual map of what’s going on in the world.”