I’m always looking for new Google products and services to see what they are up to. The place for this is at http://www.googlelabs.com/. Most of the lab products are free and are designed to be Google-easy to use plus provide powerful, time-saving features. Let’s take a look at a few products.

http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/ – This allow a user to find similar images, hence the name, similar-images. And it’s brain-dead easy to use. Just enter a query like Mizuno Baseball Gloves. This service could assist us in finding people who “borrow” our images.

http://www.google.com/trends - This works two ways. Google provides a list at the bottom, which I presume, is a recent list of popular search terms. Clicking on a popular trend term link shows more detail about the hour-by-hour rise and fall of the term and supporting articles and search results. Now, try entering a search in the Google Terms search box and you’ll get an insane graph. For even more craziness, place two words in the box separated by a comma, like Mac, PC. Unbelievable comparison! You can string together as many as you want for complex trend analysis, if your into that kind of thing.

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/ - organizes news stories chronologically. This one just blows my mind how powerful it is, yet I am unable to harness all the power. One thing is for sure that if I was back in college, this would make research so much easier. Try entering a search and changing the “show” parameter to get a broader view of the history of that particular search. Don’t forget to page back and forth. This interface is very cool indeed.Comments, Feedback, Suggestions – email mikekearns@5starnet.com