Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has announced that this week they are rolling out the ability to sort pictures based on related subjects. In the screenshot above, you will notice that when you search for a general term like “london,” then Google Images will find & sort results for “london eye,” “london big ben,” “london bridge,” and “london at night.” This feature will be activated when clicking on “Sort by subject” in the left-hand panel.
Google the Sort by Subject functionality through the combination of the Google Similar Images and Google Image Swirl features being incubated in Google Labs.

In 2001, Google launched a revolutionary addition to its search engine: Google Images. At the time, a collection of 250 million images with a single search engine was ground breaking. Google now has an index of over 10 billion images.

Chuck Rosenberg, Andy Hertzfeld, and Michael Cohen have discussed the new features that are coming out of Google Labs this week.  Google Labs is a place where Google employees can design, research, and brainstorm ideas for the company to launch as part of the 20% free time at the company.  Out of Google Labs, ideas such as Google Maps, iGoogle, and Google News has been introduced.  The two newest services to arrive in Google Labs are Similar Images and Google News Timeline.

Similar Images is a feature where Google Images uses a visual similarity engine to find images that are related to each other.  The reasoning behind creating this feature is to solve the problem of finding the right image if you can’t describe it in words.

Google News Timeline chronologically organizes results on Google News.  Users can navigate the news by using the time scale on days, weeks, years, months, years, or decades.

In order to keep up with all of the ideas that Google engineers are coming up with, the company launched Googlelabs.com.  The new website also centralizes all of the Labs information that relate to GMail, Google News, Google Office, Google Code, etc.