Google enjoys a very solid and comfortable lead in search right now and this is true for most types of searches, including image search. This doesn't mean that it can rest on its laurels, if anything Google is the company that showed others just that, so it's now launching a totally new way of discovering images via some interesting technologies and an experimental user interface. The new feature is called Google Image Swirl and is very similar to the Wonder Wheel view in the main search.

“Today, we've launched an experimental feature in Labs called Google Image Swirl, which builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface,” Aparna Chennapragada, product manager, and Yushi Jing, Google Research, explain the feature. “For example, if you search on Image Swirl for [washington], you'll see 12 image thumbnails including President Washington, the Washington Monument, a map of Washington D.C. and the Capitol Building. Once you find the group of images you're interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view.”

Image Swirl is confined to Google Labs for now, but even if it doesn't get included in the main image search in this exact form, the overall idea behind the experiment is sure to have a great influence on the future of Google's Image Search. When you do a search in Image Swirl, the first results will be in the form of 12 stacks of images grouped by similitude. Clicking on any of them will bring up the “swirl” view, centering on the group of images related to the one you clicked on.

For Image Swirl, Google builds on already existing technologies, allowing the search engine to determine how alike two images are. The algorithm is getting better as Google perfects it and it is already being used to power the Similar Images feature, which was recently introduced in Image Search, and the Face Recognition tool in Picasa. In search, the possibility to group similar images makes it easier to focus on the particular search you are interested in and with Image Swirl this is taken even further, by allowing you to narrow your search even more.