Google just released a new Google Labs project called Image Swirl. It is a visual search engine for images built to explore search queries from different visual perspectives.

Google’s official description reads:

Google Image Swirl organizes image search results into groups and sub-groups, based on their visual and semantic similarity and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface.

How it works

Search results are represented as stacks of images whereas the first image is fully shown thus giving a clue about the type of images grouped together. The stacks represent the different visual perspectives for a term (see the Apple query as an example). Once the user selects a stack, the images spread out in a relations diagram grouped by visual similarity. The original results are still visible on the side, making it easy to navigate back to the original query. This can be done repeatedly to drill down into the search result. The thickness of the edges connecting the images and groups represent the size of the connected result—the more images are in a subset the thicker the edge is displayed.

Google Image Swirl is still an early protoype and the available queries are limited, which means you can’t already search for any term. I see a lot of potential in the combination between diversity and similarity of search results as it let’s you gain overview as well as focus on a specific type of result. I recommend having a look at it and would love to hear your opinions about it in the comments.

Please welcome new player in the open data game: Socrata – a social network for data. Socrata provides a platform to publish open datasets, let’s users view, download, share, comment or rate the datasets and opens up a space to connect with fellow data enthusiasts.

The official description of Socrata

Opening government to new audiences and constituencies is the 21st century battle cry in societies everywhere. At the heart of this movement is open government data, readily accessible over the internet, in a form that maximizes comprehension, interactivity, participation, and sharing, delivered at a fraction of the cost of today’s data download sites. At Socrata, we call this social data discovery, and we’ve engineered a comprehensive suite of Web solutions for delivering social data discovery on government data sites around the world.

The Data

The datasets hosted on Socrata gets treated in a Spa-like manner. Nicely tagged and categorized each dataset has it’s own page that comes with a plethora of functionalities:

• Download the data in various formats (CSV, PDF, XML, JSON)
• Printing
• RSS Feed
• API result view
• User generated content: ratings and comments
• History of latest activity
• Charts and reports (coming soon)

A powerful feature is the tabular view of the dataset: The data can be explored, sort and filtered directly on the site. Large datasets are continuosly loaded as the user scrolls through the data to shorten loading times. Socrata even provides the code to embed the data in your own site.

As some of the datasets are very extensive the user has the possibility to filter the data. This filtered view can then be saved and used and shared as an indipendent dataset.

The Community

The Community part of Socrata comes with the most obvious social networking functionalities like user-profile, latest activity, followers, friends, etc. At this point we can hardly see greater value in this area but we’re looking forward to be proven wrong as benefits for individuals may emerge.

Find more information or visit my profile on Socrata.

Via VizWorld

Marian Dörk, Sheelagh Carpendale, and Carey Williamson from the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary are running a study “Visual Information Exploration on the Web” about the effectiveness of information visualization in search results. Participants of the study are asked to use a visual search prototype for a time period of their choosing and fill out short questionnaires before and after using the system. The purpose of this research is to better understand performance and usability issues of information visualization supporting search on the Web.

Official description

The visual search system you are about to use allows you to explore blog articles with the help of visualizations for time, location, and tags. The articles are aggregated from Global Voices, an online community of bloggers from around the world tracking and translating blog discussions particularly about non-western regions. Based on the blog posts’ contents, geographic locations are estimated by the GeoNames web service.

Marian describes the work behind the study as follows:

In general this research is about the potential of visualization for Web-based information seeking. In the long term we want to explore how visual overviews can benefit the search process and what kind of overviews make sense. With this particular study we want to let people use an early prototype of a visual search system which allows us to learn more about performance and usability issues. For the performance part, we’re logging delay times, bandwidth use, and query types, and with the feedback form we seek some initial reactions from information seekers about such a visual approach to search and browsing.

Participate and help establish understanding

There are no specific tasks we ask you to do as part of this study. You can freely explore the interface and go through the information. For example, you could zoom into a particular region of the world you are interested in, say Africa, select the last couple of days, and go through the tag cloud to see what kind of topics are currently discussed. Similarly, you can filter by tags and see when and where certain topics have been more active. You can combine visual filters however you want – you can also add a text query.

Google just recently released another useful Google Labs product called Google Squared. It’s basically a search engine that organizes the search results as tabular data by finding similar attributes. Although the engine aims to deliver a perfect match, Google Squared also acts like a research tool where you can collect and refine your findings.

Google’s official description:

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them “Squares” for fun).
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you’re interested in.
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
• Save and share Squares with others.

Customizable table headers

The user can easily add or remove table headers. While “remove” simply dismisses the information for all the table rows, “add” let’s the user define an attribute and the engine then fills up the cells for each row. Attributes can also be added using a complete new search and then hitting “Add to this square” and Google will add the resulting attributes to the already existing table.

Trustful sources

Sometimes there may be multiple values for an attribute. The user can view the source by hovering over the cell. Other possible values can be viewed and selected by clicking the respective link.

Working tool?

Squares can be saved for reference or future customizations. Once a customized Square is saved it can be shared using the modified URL – if it’s not saved the same URL will show the default Square for this search query. Something we’d love to be able to do: As the data is already in a structured form it would be easy for Google to offer a Create Spreadsheet from Square option. So the data could be distributed and used in different ways.

Try this customized search query for Bauhaus Designers.