Google Image Swirl

Google is continuing to explore the possibilities of image search. They've recently done work on images and Creative Commons, Google Similar Images,  and Google image size search. They're now playing with something they call the Image Swirl, and you can play along by going to the Image Swirl lab page. Now, don't get too excited, because you can't just play around with any old term - but there are about 200,000 terms that you can use. I tried my usual 'Hubble Telescope' search, and this is what I was presented with:

Nice, but not exciting at this stage. However, you can see that behind each image is a stack of others. What Google is trying to do is to sort of types of images, so we have collections of images of the telescope, but also various different types of images that it's taken. Click on a stack, and Google Swirl brings it centre stage thus:

This should actually look a little bit familiar as it's akin to the Google Wonder Wheel that they've had available for some time now.  I can continue to click on images and Google will continue to present them to me, while keeping my history available, and this is where we end up with the 'swirl' concept:

I can of course simply click on an image at any point to go directly to it - a mouse cursor over gives me basic information about the image - size and web location.

Swirl is a great tool if you're interested in browsing through a lot of images quickly, and it's also very nice if you want to focus on a particular type of image - searching for buses led me immediately to the option of looking at different coloured buses as well as line drawings. Bing is going to have their work cut out to try and catch up.

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