Google refines searches for pictures and news

Google has unveiled software tools that let people search the Internet using pictures or chronologically organize results of queries for news.

Fledgling versions of Similar Images and News Timeline made their way out of Google Labs, a place where engineers at the California-based Internet giant get to spend time tinkering with promising innovations.

A Similar Images feature added to Google’s Image Search tool lets people scour the Internet for like photographs with a single computer mouse click.

Examples provided by Google include refining a search for “jaguar” to provide only images of the jungle cat or the luxury automobile.

“So if you see an image you like, but you’re stumped on how to describe it, just click the ‘Similar images’ link to see more like it,” reads an online posting yesterday by ‘Googlers’ Chuck Rosenberg, Andy Hertzfeld, and Michael Cohen.

Google News Timeline amasses stories from newspapers, magazines, blogs and other sources and presents search results in chronological graphs that can be zoomed in on or navigated by dates.