Things at Google sometimes go slow but they certainly work in the end once the product is solid. In other words, when the app sees the light of day it is going to be a reliable asset on the market. Besides generally buying the right stuff from the right people at the right moment, they have this 20 percent time company policy for engineers to indulge in developing an idea once a week. On top of the given productivity yielded that day lies Google Labs, founded by the company in 2002 . Many bright ideas have evolved in there on their way to success while some others still rest at the bottom of a drawer or get personally killed by Google from time to time. The idea does not always appear from scratch but belongs to another company with a lot of expectations set on passing the key tests Google imposes on the ultimate toy before it comes of age. That’s simply the way Google has in order to be sure about certain products. They give their employees some time to play with raw material, domestic or imported, let everybody see what’s happening on the benchmark, allowing customer feedback, if interest grows then that project gets the green light and full priority. If the stuff is superb but is shunned by potential users, then it is bound to fail. The equation favors demand so the odds are higher for it to succeed by reducing the error margin. But why am I giving you this sermon today? The purpose of this introduction is to announce the recent appearance of a new Google Labs project called Image Swirl.
What is Image Swirl?: It is a tool that takes features from Similar Images recently introduced in Google Images as a “Find similar images” link under many of the pictures and Google Wonder Wheel launched in May 2009 and shown in the options section of Google search engine results. This time, instead of grouping relevant words in a cluster as in the latter we will be dealing with images. Not that the idea of clusters is new but applying this technology to Google Images is definitely an interesting move. Perhaps the project is finally buried when users get bored of fumbling with the brand new contrivance but the intention behind revamping Google Images is what counts. Google Images search handles a gargantuan amount of traffic and of course the company does not do this out of philanthropy. News like Google giving funds to Pixazza last March (finally they raised $5.75 million in Series A funding), a sort of Adsense for images “enlisting people to tag photos with links that let Web surfers buy the products shown” ring a bell now in November. What is Google up to? (redundant question lately). I don’t really know. Hopefully, that huge investment is not related to Image Swirl at all but I am reluctant to accept that this is just to improve the user experience. Guess what, last Oct 27 they announced here a brand new Product ideas for Google Images page. After all this time!?
So here is my point, this is not just one more insignificant minor project to play around with cluster technology, this is just the tip of an iceberg. Adsense ads are already on top of the thumbnails while you use Google Image but what about placing the ads inside any odd harmless picture in every cluster. But let’s not be that negative and hope for the best; let’s just expect new technologies to be applied in our favorite search engine. Business is business and people have to make a little money to make ends meet.
