ResearchBuzz

Late last month Google announced a couple fun products in Google Labs, one for Google Images and one for Google News.

Google Images now has a “similar images” search at http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/. Search for an image (you don’t have to restrict yourself to the ones on the front page) and you’ll get a page of results. Some of the results will have a “similar images” link underneath them. Click on that and you’ll get a group of images that are, well, similar.

Sometimes this will be prosaic; do a search for grizzly bear, do a similar search for the grizzy bear with his mouth open, and you’ll get a page full of grizzly bears with their mouths open, or grizzly bear head shots, or inexplicably, a moose. The fun begins when you do less-straightforward searches. I did a search for beach lightning and picked an interesting shot (clouds boiling over the ocean, a bolt of lightning) for the similar images. What I found was that the similar images didn’t appear to look for certain elements so much (like the lightning) as much as swathes of color and the horizontal and vertical arrangements of elements. The similar search found me some lightning shots, some beach sunset shots, and this great wave image from Flickr.

I would encourage you to stick to static elements, though; I did a search for exhaustion and did a similar image search for a picture of an exhausted guy lying on his back in the mud. I ended up with paint ball pictures and several renfest shots. I have no idea how. The occasional map image was thrown in. Stick to concrete subjects unless you enjoy surrealism.

The second product is Google News Timeline, up for testing at http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/. The page presents a grid of a week with news stories splashed across it. Enter a query and get very focused stories, all set up across a timeline so you can quickly browse for the highlights of a particular day. Search for H1N1 with the grid to show you weeks’ worth of stories instead of days’, and you’ll see how quickly the swine flu issue blew up in the media.

The entries on the calendar will show a headline and a snippet and sometimes a very small photograph. You can also adjust the calendar to show different size fonts. Google does seem to be featuring certain content providers, but I got search results from all over the Web when I ran a standard news timeline search.

Don’t leave yet, though. If you’ll look at the pulldown next to the query box you’ll see that you can map all kinds of things onto this calendar, including news videos, quotes, and photos. There are also more general things you can map on this calendar, like TV shows, blogs and even video games. Be careful; this can turn into a serious timesink. (Do not make me map animated cartoons onto a release calendar.)

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten really wound up about new Google Labs offerings, but these are great. Well done guys.

The Revelstoke Railway Museum, in British Columbia, Canada, had a digital archive of images that got wiped out by a computer virus last year, but it’s recently gotten a new grant and is starting all over again! The Revelstoke Railway Museum Photo Archive is currently available with over 600 photos at http://www.railwaymuseum.com/cgi-bin/photo_archive/imageFolio.cgi. (The museum’s collection actually has over 6500 images and more will be added to the online archive over time.)

The archive is divided into categories including Bridges, Tunnels, Equipment, and even Train Wrecks, but the biggest part of the archive is the selection of locomotive images, with over 200 available. That category is further divided into Cabooses (caboosi?), Passenger Trains, Diesel, and Steam Locomotive (again the largest section with over 150 images available.) Images are presented in a galley format with a default of 16 to a page (you can change that to 8 or 12 if you like.) The listings show thumbnails, number of hits, size of image (in Kb, not dimensions) and the date it was added. (There’s also a spot for ratings but I didn’t see it used much.)

Click on the image and you’ll get a much larger image and a description, usually brief, sometimes not helpful (“View of unknown steam engine.”) Available sizes are somewhat limited; I was disappointed that I couldn’t zoom in more on the pictures. You can send pictures as an e-postcard, but I didn’t see any links for further manipulation.

Actually all the fun stuff for this archive seems to be at the nav at the bottom of the pages. There you can get the newest pictures (the most recent ones were added 3/17) as well as a random selection and the most-viewed and top-rated images. There’s even a ten-second slide show mode, so you can pick a category, kick back and watch the pictures go by.

It’s easy to tell that this digital archive is in its early beginnings; there’s a lot of fleshing out to do here. But the categorization breaks down well, some of the photos here are very unusual (top view of a steam engine buried by an avalanche) and there’s a lot, lot more to come. Worth a look.

I actually learned about this resource while doing some research for something else, which is one of my favorite ways of finding out about buzzworthy resources. The Warbird Registry describes itself this way: “Over time we would like to develop a database of all military aircraft that have entered civilian hands from World War II to present.” The site itself is available at http://www.warbirdregistry.org/. It’s not a database per se; instead it has a large number of aircraft models on the front page divided into several categories.

Categories include fighters, bombers, transports, etc. While there are some subcategory pages, in many cases the aircraft model numbers are just listed on this one page. You’ll have to know something about military aircraft (I don’t) or just enjoy browsing around (I did.) I looked at the transport category and picked out the “C-119 Flying Boxcar” because it sounded interesting. That model’s page has a list of 13 serial numbers. Click on one and you’ll get information about where that particular aircraft is, some of its history, and in many cases pictures. Good old C-119 Flying Boxcar 51-2566, for example, was at the Museum of Aviation at Warner Robins AFB from at least 1986-2006 (each aircraft’s page shows a “last reported” date) and there are two pictures available.

How much information you get on a particular aircraft just depends on that aircraft and apparently to some extent the model. I took a look at the Spitfires. There were a lot more of them and they had a lot more history and details. For example, Spitfire P9306 has a huge history listed, starting with its construction in 1939.

If you like this resource page you might want to check out the Warbirds Resource Group at http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/, which also has forums, book reviews, and resource centers devoted to various aspects of military aircraft. It looks like some sections of this site are rather old (the link list was last verified in 2001 according to its page) but the forums appear active and there’s enough located on site and in the registry for lots of happy browsing.