For now, this search only includes CC-licensed images from Flickr, Yahoo's own photo sharing service. The Yahoo Image Search interface actually turns out to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.

Flickr's own search interface is relatively clunky compared to Yahoo Image Search and the filter settings on Flickr are hidden behind the advanced search feature which only appears after you have initiated a regular search. While this is also true for Yahoo Image Search, Yahoo remembers your settings between search sessions, which is quite a time-saver.

There are also a number of third-party tools for searching CC-licensed images on Flickr, including compfight, one of our favorites, but few are as slick as Yahoo's Image Search.

As we reported earlier this year, most Flickr users choose the most restrictive licenses for their images, but with over 100 million CC-licensed images on Flickr, chances are that you will find a good picture with the right license for almost any occasion.

Google added a number of interesting features to Google Image search lately, including the ability to filter pictures by style and color. Now, this new Google Labs project can also find similar images. In our tests, this worked quite well and this new feature should make it easier to find just the right image. Though, for now, it seems like only a select number of images feature the "similar images" link.

Google News Timeline

The more interesting new project, however, is News Timeline. Google Labs already featured the ability to add timelines to your search results and Google News features some basic functions for restricting results to certain dates, but the News Timeline, as the name implies, focuses on news stories and represents a major step forward for this feature.

Users can choose to display the most important stories about a topic by day, month, year, or decade. Most importantly, it is also easy to restrict searches by the type of source, including blogs, newspapers, news photos, and Wikipedia, or the type of content, including music and artwork. Interestingly, some of our searches for blogs also included a number of results from public twitter profiles.

The new News Timeline also features relevant photos and YouTube videos, which play right in the timeline interface. Interestingly, you can also choose from a number of features, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, though the selection here is currently limited to only two newspapers and a handful of magazines and blogs. The timeline will also include media files from Freebase.

A New Look and Home for Google Labs

Google Labs now features a new interface and it also finally has its own domain at Googlelabs.com and an RSS feed. Google has clearly taken to the 'labs' idea and after using it for Gmail and Google Code, it seems like it is ready to roll it out to a broader audience.

Now, Google is working to fix that with new filtering options.

Still, I have to admit that I'm with Tam Vo over at VentureBeat. Even with these new options, the filter that would provide the most value is still conspicuously absent. I remain hopeful that Google Image Search takes a page from Flickr's book and adds the ability to search by Creative Commons licensing.

Until filtering by license information becomes available, Image Search remains a valuable tool for finding images - and with the new filters you have a much better chance of finding what you're seeking - but they're not images you're likely able to use, legally.

There are tons of sites on the web that you want to tag and share with others, but there are also plenty that don't need to be out there for everyone to see. You don't need to socially share the link to your blog's administration page, for example, or the link to your local news and weather site. You certainly don't need to share the links to that weird health ailment you've been googling, either. Or perhaps you want to keep private the research you've been doing for an upcoming article on your blog.

Of course, you could just bookmark these pages using a web 2.0 service and set them to "private," but there's something to be said for having the links close at hand, available in only a couple of clicks from your browser's menu.

The only problem with using a browser's bookmark menu - the problem that the Web 2.0 bookmarking services meant to solve - is that when you have so many links saved, it becomes difficult to find them again. You even start to forget what you have in there. With delicious, Ma.gnolia, etc., this problem was dealt with by tagging favorites with keywords to make them more easily searchable.

Visual Search For Personal Bookmarks

While tagging may work for some, the new service from Tidy Favorites thinks they have a better way - visual search.

We've noticed visual search is a space that's heating up. There are iPhone apps and visual search engines galore. Even Amazon got in the mix with their new "window shopping" storefront.

Now you can take advantage of the power of visual search to browse through your own bookmarks, too. (Yes, we know Ma.gnolia uses thumbnails, but it's not quite the same.)

How Tidy Favorites Works

Tidy Favorites installs like desktop software, but functions as a browser plugin. If anything, it's more like Evernote than it is like a Web 2.0 bookmarking service. 

What makes Tidy Favorites easy to use is its simplicity. To bookmark a page, all you need to do is click the "Plus" button it adds to your browser toolbar. Then, to interact and organize your favorites, you just click the "Star" button.

The Tidy Favorites organizer will appear, pre-loaded with a tab that displays your "Top Links." These are the sites you visit a lot, similar to what both Opera and Google Chrome display when you open a new tab.

Uncategorized bookmarks reside in the Tidy Favorites sidebar, ready to be orgnaized. At the bottom of the dashboard, you can right-click to add a new tab. Then you simply drag and drop links from your sidebar onto that tab's page. The tabs at the bottom are very intuitive to use if, especially if you're familiar with Excel spreadsheets. Within each tab, you can also right-click to add folders to further categorize your favorites.

Other Nifty Features

Besides just organizing bookmarks, Tidy Favorites has a few extra features that make it stand out. One such feature is a cropping tool that lets you slice out a piece of a web page and save that as the visual thumbnail for the site. For example, if you regularly visit a page to see your local forecast, you could slice out the part that just shows the weather, instead of creating a thumbnail of the entire page.

Using this option, you could make a dashboard of at-a-glance information within one of Tidy Favorites' tabs. When you think of all the different ways you could use this tool, you'll realize that this feature could actually be an improvement on using dashboard-like homepages where data comes from pre-designed widgets and RSS feeds.

Tidy Favorites is also portable, so if you want to take your links to go, you can add them to a USB drive.

The Not-So-Good Stuff

One feature of the software that really needs to work well is the built-in search box. Using the search function, you should be able to easily search your bookmarks by entering in a keyword or search term, then click "Google," "Images," or "Wiki" (Wikipedia).  When using the Google option, it will by default search your favorites like a Google Custom Search Engine would. But upon testing this, it wasn't finding some links saved even though I used good keywords. It seemed to be returning Google search results, but it was supposed to be searching the bookmarks only. Obviously, this is a critical feature that still needs some work.

Another big problem is that, unfortunately, this software is currently Windows-only. The page that it displays is saved on your computer itself, as its URL starts with your local IP (127.0.0.1). Why this can't be ported over to Mac or Linux is unknown, but we hope they are working on it.

We'll keep our eye on Tidy Favorites for now. It's still rather new, so we'll let them iron out some of the kinks we saw. They still have minor usability tweaks to make like deleting thumbnails from the sidebar after they're dropped in a tab. We think the bookmarks should automatically arrange themselves on the page, too. If they can fix these problems, we could definitely see this as being a great tool for organizing sites, but it's clear they're not quite there yet. So until then, it's back to Evernote for us.

German vs. U.S. Law

In the U.S., Google has been involved in similar cases, including the infamous Perfect 10 v. Google case, where Perfect 10 claimed that Google's image previews were violating Perfect 10's copyright. While the U.S. courts first granted Perfect 10's requests to remove the images, Google won its appeal because the court argued that Google's use of the thumbnails was to be considered fair use.

Robots.txt Anybody?

We would think that photographers and cartoonists would be happy to have their images featured and promoted in Google's image search. Also, a quick edit of a website's robot.txt file would have prevented Google from indexing the images in the first place.

From the labs of the makers of the image search engine TinEye comes an extraordinary product. The Multicolr Search Lab allows users to select up to 10 colors that they would like the images they are searching for to contain. To make a color more prominent in the image search results simply select that color several times from the provided color palette. As you pick and choose your colors the search results will automatically refresh with images that represent your new color selections.

So far, the Multicolr Search lab is available for Flickr and Alamy Stock Photography. However, not every Flickr image will be searched. According to the site, they extract the colors "from 3 million "interesting" Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour."

Unique Image Search Engines

In addition to the Multicolr Search Lab, I'd also recommend checking out the BYO Image Search Lab from Idée. The BYO or 'Bring Your Own' Image Search Lab allows you to upload an image or choose one that's available on the web and find images from Alamy with similarities such as color tones.

Both search engines are great and unique tools to make the best of. I didn't have any problems getting great matches to the colors and images that I provided. Another bonus is the use of the Flickr "Interesting" set to ensure the best quality photo results. These are two great services that we'll be sure to keep an eye on.

Cooliris' PicLens is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest browser add-ons currently available. When we first reviewed it in February, Josh Catone called it 'nifty' and 'gorgeous.' Both of these adjectives still fully apply to PicLens, but since then, the company has added a large number of new features. These include a stronger emphasis on displaying videos and integration with Amazon, as well as support for a few more photo sharing sites.

At its most basic level, PicLens, which is now at version 1.7, allows you to quickly browse through images from photo and video sharing sites on a full-screen 3D wall. This wall looks a lot like Apple's Cover Flow and the screen-shots here really don't do it justice.

One thing that might come as a disappointment to users is that PicLens doesn't work with every site. However, PicLens does support a wide range of photo sharing sites, social networks, and image search services, including Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, DeviantArt, Smugmug, MySpace, Facebook, and Google Images. In its newest version, PicLens now also supports searching for videos in YouTube. PicLens should also work on any other site that has a Media RSS feed enabled.

Cooliris has also made a plugin available that allows owners of self-hosted WordPress sites to enable PicLens' functionality for their blogs.

As for browsers, PicLens supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Window Shopping in 3D

One interesting function PicLens has added, is the ability to do a visual search through Amazon's online store. Scrolling through the covers of books, CDs, and videos, or even browsing the apparel section is surprisingly fast and actually turns out to be quite a lot of fun. Clicking on an item enlarges it and brings up the price and a short description. One limitation of this search is that you can't specify anything else but keywords. Items can't be organized by price or any other filter normally available on Amazon such as brand or seller. This is even more limiting because you can't do a search on Amazon and then have PicLens display the results of your search, making the feature quite a bit less useful.

It's Pretty, But Is it Useful?

Whenever a piece of software looks as good as PicLens does, the question that comes up pretty quickly is how useful it can actually be.

The Amazon integration is most useful when you are searching for a specific look or just browsing through books for the sake of it, but otherwise, it feels more like a gimmick than a useful feature.

PicLens is at its best when displaying objects from photo and video sites. Having the ability to visually browse through a large number of items gives it a clear heads-up over the functionality of these web services themselves, and, at the end of the day, it's also plain fun to use.

Compfight allows users to easily find a host of images on Flickr. Just type in a keyword or several keywords and Compfight will display numerous images on one page without the miscellaneous information. With the right keywords, the likelihood of you going past page 1 is slim to none. For images with a blue bar at the bottom of an image, hovering your mouse over the image will conveniently give you the dimensions. The only downside is that this enhancement is only available for original images found on Flickr.

click to enlarge

Advanced Settings

The best part about Compfight is it's advanced search settings. You can toggle your search phrase between tags only and the entire text. This is perfect if one setting produces weak results. Just switch to the other and see if it helps. You can also restrict search results to Creative Common licenses, even for commercial images. Want only original images? You can toggle that as an option too along with safe-search.

The Perfect Image Finder For Bloggers

Compfight is a perfect tool for bloggers to utilize to find images for their posts. With a vast array of features and great settings for both commercial and non-commercial blogs, we doubt you'll be let down with Compfight's results. In comparison to Google Image Search, you won't have to worry about running into any legal issues down the line. On the hand, Compfight beats messing around with Flickr's advanced settings. While Flickr may have more options, Compfight gives you the most popular advanced settings without the added hassle or confusion.

Nicholas Carr blogged about Gwap a couple of days after its launch, noting that "one thing the Internet enables, which wasn't possible before, at least not on anywhere near the same scale, is the transfer of human intelligence into machine intelligence." In Gwap, which stands for "Games With a Purpose," that transfer of intelligence is done by getting people to do the routine chores that computers don't know how to do - chores like tagging photos, describing songs, and outlining objects, as well as transferring a good bit of human common sense to the machine. The trick to getting people to do these things is to make the work fun. Hence the games.

The creator of these games is Luis von Ahn, winner of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and a pioneer in the field of human computation. Ahn is most notable for helping to develop CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), those somewhat annoying but rather effective distorted letter puzzles used millions of times each day. Last year, he also introduced the "reCAPTCHA," where CAPTCHAs were used to gain access to a web site while also helping digitize old books.

Gwap homepage

The Games

Gwap currently features five games, one of which is an old classic called the ESP Game. In the ESP game, two players view the same image and try to guess words that the other player would use to describe it. Google licensed this technology and launched Google Image Labeler to help improve the quality of their image search results.

• Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, is designed to eventually enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best.
• Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs so that computers can search for music other than by title - such as happy songs or love songs.
• Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge that will amass facts for use by artificial intelligence programs.
• Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.

According to the Carnegie Mellon announcement, von Ahn plans to add a lot of games to the site, saying "we have three more that we'll be launching in the coming months." He hopes that by having all the games on the same site it will encourage players to try several different ones. Players also have a single sign-on and password, Top Player rankings, and online chats, said von Ahn.

The Human Processor

In his whitepaper entitled "Invisible Computing," von Ahn compared game design to to algorithm creation, saying:

"...it must be proven correct, its efficiency can be analyzed, a more efficient version can supersede a less efficient one, and so on. Instead of using a silicon processor, these "algorithms" run on a processor consisting of ordinary humans interacting with computers over the Internet."

In other words, we're the processor. The machine is us.

This concept isn't entirely new - Amazon's Mechanical Turk, for example, pays people to contribute their time to work on small, simple tasks called "Human Intelligence Tasks," or HITs. However, unlike HITs, which can sometimes be boring or tedious, the games on Gawp are actually fun - and they don't feel like work.

Some believe that human powered processing is the next big wave for computing. You could argue that Mahalo, the human-powered search engine is an example of this. (Though others call it a human-powered link farm.) Perhaps a better example is ChaCha, the mobile Q&A service that uses human guides to respond to questions called or texted in from your cell phone. We've also covered other human-powered services on RWW in the past, like the Galaxy Zoo and Stardust@Home project, among other (our coverage here). Many of these efforts have tried to incorporate an element of "fun" into what is actually work.

Whether Gwap will actually gain momentum and get a large number of people involved is yet to be seen, but it is definitely has potential to help teach computers the things they can't do for themselves....yet.

Collaborative digital collections

• Alabama Mosaic: Thousands images that can be searched by keyword. Images are from historical collections featureubg content from libraries, archives and museums from across Alabama.
• Alaska Digital Archives: More than 5,000 quality digital images of Alaska's heritage in a searchable online database.
• Calisphere: A free online collection of more than 150,000 digitized primary materials contributed by libraries, archives, and museums from all over California. Search for content by keyword, by browsing the alphabetized subject list and exploring theme collections, such as the Gold Rush Era and World War II. Lesson plans are also available for elementary and secondary schoolteachers.

Calisphere

• Library of Congress American History and Culture Collections:  These collections began as a pilot project in 1990 to provide middle school as well as high school teachers and students with digital surrogates of collection material on CD-ROM. Over the years, the collection has become a "National Digital Library" with diverse institutions from all across the United States contributing content. Search or browse alphabetized subject lists, time periods, and geographical locations. American Memory Historical Collections features more than 100 thematic subjects ranging from advertising to maps to women's rights.
• Library of Congress International Collections: Access content from American Memory Historical Collections as well as international visual resource collections, such as the Abdul Hamid II collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Prokudin-Gorskii collection of photographs of the Russian Empire. Additionally, through partnerships with national libraries in other countries, you can access collections that highlight the history of the United States in relation to other nations, such as "France in America" and "The Meeting of Frontiers: Siberia, Alaska and the American West."
• University of Washington Digital Collections: Access to tens of thousands of digital images covering a wide variety of subjects, but with an emphasis on the Pacific Northwest. The digital collections include image-heavy resources, such as the J. Willis Sayre Photographs of actors, vaudeville performers, and movie stills; the Washington Women's History Consortium Fashion Plate Collection; the Dearborn-Massar Photographs of Architecture; and the Seattle Photographs Collection.
• Photomuse: A research resource for the history of photography. Features online exhibitions, a chronology of the evolution of photography complete with visuals and historical information, as well as an image database.

Photomuse

University digital image collections

• Duke Digital Collections: Featured collections are freely available on the Internet and include the Emergence of Advertising in America, Ration Coupons on the Home Front (1942-1945), and the 50,000 item William Gedney Photographs and Writings collection.
• Yale University Library Digital Collections: More than 100,000 digital images are searchable and viewable by the public.
• Harvard University Library: A Selection of Web-Accessible Collections: A list of visual resource collections that are unique to Harvard University, but reside in different repositories on the Harvard campus. Collections include the Harvard Daguerreotype Collection, the Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, Immigration to the United States (1789-1930), Legal Portraits Online, and the Latin American Pamphlet Digital Collection.

Harvard

Digital image collections at public libraries and archives

• Historical Photograph Collections at the Arizona State Archives: 33,000 digital images of primary materials from the historical photograph collections. Most of the photographs available through the public online database date to before 1940 and include examples of all types of photographic processes, including tintypes, glass lantern slides, and photographic postcards.
• Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog: Get access to more than 1 million digital images via one of the largest digital image databases in the world. Search for images by keyword, by browsing lists of alphabetized subjects, or by choosing a collection and looking through individual image records.
• Los Angeles Public Library: More than 60,000 images featuring the work of many notable photographers active in the Los Angeles area over many decades, including some contemporary photographers. Search by keyword or photographer.
• New York Public Library Digital Gallery: One of the largest open-access image databases available on the Internet featuring more than 600,000 digital images, including all kinds of primary materials, such as manuscripts, maps, photographs, prints, restaurant menus, sheet music covers, and much more.

NY Public Library

Digital image collections at historical societies

• Indiana Historical Society: An extensive collection, covering topics ranging from architecture to railroads to sporting events.
• Wisconsin Historical Society: A visual resource for Wisconsin history containing 35,000 photographs. Of special interest is the Wisconsin Historical Museum's Children's Clothing Collection where visitors may browse images of more than 2,000 articles of children's clothing dating back to the 18th century.

Other

• Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS): Through this database, it is also possible to carry out federated searching across the hundreds of digital collections that received support from IMLS. Adding "image" to the keyword search will retrieve digital images and their corresponding metadata.
• OK, not exactly "deep web," but you can't leave this one out. The Library of Congress Photostream on Flickr: More than 3,000 images on Flickr. The Library of Congress is the flagship partner for the site's project known as The Commons, which aims to increase exposure to public image collections housed at civic institutions around the world and to facilitate knowledge about the collections.

Library of Congress

You can learn more about the history of these collections and get details on how to search them from the article here.

At first glance, ScrnShots appears to be a takeoff on sites like FFFFOUND! or We Heart It (our coverage). Those sites let you "favorite" pictures from the web as inspiring, interesting, artistic, and so on. ScrnShots takes it a step further, encouraging you to take a screenshot of the image and then upload it to their service.

Once uploaded, you can tag the screenshot, add a description, and notate the URL from which it came. The screenshot is then available for others to find and use on their own site via an embed code. For example, here's a screenshot I took of a Twitter review site, microrevie.ws:

A Sample Embedded Screenshot

For that screenshot, I used the thumbnail-sized embed code, but there was also an embed code for the full-screen version as well as a medium-sized version, which is the one that displays by default when you go to view a particular screenshot's page.

Grabbing the embed code was as simple as copy-and-paste, but I initially thought that the embed code feature wasn't working yet because, when looking at the embed code on the page, it showed only a truncated portion of the embed code's URL. (See below). However, after copying-and-pasting, through some sort of technological magic, the entire embed code appeared.

The Embed Codes

There is also a blog widget available from ScrnShots which allows you to paste a widgetized version of a screenshot or screenshots onto your own site or social network profile. The widget comes in small or medium size and can be configured to display anywhere from one to ten of your most recent screenshots. Feeds for each user's recent screenshots and favorite screenshots are available as well.

The ScrnShots web site is well-designed and easy to use. However, the one thing it lacks is some sort of upload tool. As it is right now, screenshots have to be uploaded one-by-one, a tedious process that simply takes to long for anyone to become a heavy user of the service. That could be by design though, since they are still in private beta and may not be ready for massive uploads of photos just yet.

When it comes to their business model, ScrnShots is taking a page from flickr's book.  At launch the site will be free with unlimited uploads, and, on June 6th, the PRO service will begin. With a PRO account, you can continue to upload unlimited screenshots and mark them as private, where they can only be shared with specific people you designate. Basic account owners can continue to use the service for free, but will have a monthly cap on uploads.

ScrnShots vs Flickr

ScrnShots will certainly appeal to the design community, who may want to use it to share images with each other, but it seems odd to focus on just that niche when there is an untapped potential to become the main site where bloggers can share and store screenshots with each other. As a blogger myself, I know that I have a whole folder of screenshots taking up space on my computer. They aren't worthy of of the gig of storage they consume and they aren't important enough for me to bother uploading to flickr, yet I haven't deleted any of them just in case I need to reuse one at some point. Having a site where I could offload them would be incredibly handy.

Inspirational Designs of Shots of Web Sites?

In addition, flickr, being the big sharing site for photographers, is filled with photos with varying levels of copyright. Some you can use, some you can't, some you can if you link to a URL and give the photographers name, etc. On flickr, there are some people don't care if you use their image, but there are many others who think that it's worthy of link to their web site if you do so.

Personally (and I think many bloggers would agree with me on this), I don't think taking a screenshot of a web site or logo represents any special effort on my part, so I would have no problem uploading all my screenshots to a service like ScrnShots for others to use. And as a blogger, having a site filled with publicly available screenshots for use, worry-free, would be a great resource.

So a search technology that actually looked at a picture and could understand what was in it -- or at least match like images -- would have a large number of practical applications. Picollator's online demo is based on software of the same name from parent company Recogmission. The demo allows users to upload an image of a face to the site, and then attempts to match it to similar images it has gathered from around the web.

One of the main issues we've noticed with most of these facial recognition products is their inability to deal with my facial hear -- sometimes even thinking that my dark beard is really an indication of my skin tone. So I was excited when Picollator matched me to a picture of Russell Crowe. I don't really look like Crowe, but believe it or not, people actually used to tell me I did back in college.

Unfortunately for Picollator, subsequent tests with different images were less successful. It had trouble dealing with an older picture of mine (though to be fair it had less face and more body), and also didn't respond well to a black and white picture. And if their software really is accurate, I am dating a girl who basically looks like any celebrity that smiles.

What that means is basically that image recognition software still has a long way to go. Certainly, these technologies will improve over time, but for now, the flawed approach of text based image search from Google, Yahoo! and the other big search engines is probably the best way to go.