Google Labs, the place were Google software engineers post the ideas they’ve come up with while in their “20% time” (the one day per week when they get to work on something that is not job related), comes now with two new offerings: Similar Images, a handy way of locating images that resemble one another, and Google News Timeline, a means of organizing news articles according to their timeline.

“Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the right image if you can't describe it in words. The new Similar Images feature was developed with just this in mind. Using it you can now find images that look like an existing result simply by clicking on a link. Using visual similarity, you don't have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link of an image you like,” explains Software Engineer, Chuck Rosenberg.

The whole process is quite straightforward: just visit the Similar Images web page here, type in a query of your choice, and locate the image that you want and then click the “Similar images” button to locate images that resemble that one.

The second feature provided by Google Labs is Google News Timeline, a handy way of viewing news articles in an organized manner. Software Engineer Andy Hertzfeld explains: “We're announcing Google News Timeline--a new feature on Google Labs that organizes many different types of search results on a zoomable, graphical timeline. Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, including headlines, quotes, photos from our Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search. You can also add Blog Search results and sports scores, as well as information about books, music, movies, TV shows, video games, and even artists, to see how they've appeared over time.”