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.

Getting started with Dipity is easy. Simply start feeding the service your data: photos from Flickr or Picasa, blog entries, RSS feeds, music from Last.fm or Pandora, videos, or microbloging feeds. Anything that offers a publicly accessible feed is fair game.

And that means, that it's not just your data. It's any publicly accessible data. If you want to add data from other RSS feeds - say you wanted a timeline showing when the top tech blogs publish stories - you can do that, as well. Or maybe you'd like to add content from a Google alert or Yahoo! Pipes? Or build something with Dapper to populate your timeline? All viable options. Suffice it to say, there are any number of ways to feed Dipity.

But, the true value of Dipity is how it lets you visualize that data. Once the sources are added, the service plots each discrete element along a timeline. And that view of the data provides a very different perspective of "what's happening when." You can also zoom in and out of the timeline - down to hours or out to years - to help provide additional perspective.

It's a like a graphing engine for your lifestream - or any combined stream of reference data.

After only a few minutes, I was working to push all sorts of random collections through the tool. No doubt, you're already thinking of some very interesting data sets to run through it, as well. And if you're short on ideas, the folks at Dipity have compiled some interesting timelines to inspire you.

Interested in taking a different view of the data you're producing? Visit Dipity and register for a free account.