Google Labs is a fascinating part of Google's website, showcasing projects that are under development to improve the search experience as well as many of the other services now offered by Google. The BBC reports on several new services that are being tested - Similar Images and Timeline Search, plus Google has also announced the new Profiles service.

Similar Images allows users to sort through the results of an image search more easily by clicking on a link so that in cases where a variety of images may initially be displayed for a search, the query is expressed visually as an image and not text to focus the results. Google has been spending a lot of development time on improving the image search engine and recently introduced a colour-match function within the Image Search tool to enable users to find similar colour-themed results.

The Google News Timeline tool allows searchers to view a history of articles, photographs and videos for their chosen search, arranged by date, week, month or year. Users can also refine the search to specific magazines, newspapers or blogs as well as results from Wikipedia, movies, music or even video games.

Finally, the Google Profile is a new option of Google account holders to control how they present their details on Google products to other Google users. Users control how their details appear and they can add more information about themselves, along the lines of a very basic social networking site. In this way, users with a Google profile can share web content in one central location, such as links to a blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.