Google Labs Similar Images

I saw a tweet yesterday from Lisa Thumann at the Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education. She's got her finger on the pulse of the educational technology world and she mentioned a new technology from Google Labs called Similar Images.

In my short play-test, I found it to be extremely successful. Here is quick walkthrough of how it works:

1. Visit the site and search for an image of something, I chose fencing and got this screen full of images:



2. Click 'Similar Images' beneath an image for which you'd like to see others like it, I clicked the fifth image and got this:



While they're all sketches, they're not all fencing images.

I went back and clicked the first image in the list (a shot of American Jon Tiomkin versus Renal Ganeev of Russia in the Athens Olympics in 2004) and got this:



Which are all images of two Olympic or world cup fencers on a very dark background. Pretty nice work for a computer!