A New Google Image Search

Google has been widely known for quietly working on things in the background and then slowly showing them to people with little fanfare through their Google Labs entity.  Every now and again I see what Google Labs (which always makes me think of Bunson Honeydew’s Muppet Labs) is up to for my gmail, but today I stumbled across something pretty cool.

Google Image Swirl.

 image swirlAs you can see, you make a search and a cloud of images appear.  You click on one and it shows you more in the background similar to the one you clicked on. It’s an incredibly logical way to refine searches of images.  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’d search for an image based on key words and have to hope it was there.  Ten minutes of tinkering with this and I found a couple of images I actually had a hard time finding before.

It’s very intuitive to use.

Now all we need to do is make it a 3D hologram and the Minority Report interface is one step closer.

And let’s be honest…  after Google Buzz, they need a hit.