Image search is an area of intense competition between Google, Yahoo, and now Bing. Today, Google Images added some search options to make it easier to filter a search by color, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and file size.
Most of these filters were available before in advanced search, but now they are available in the left-hand column. (A similar option column was introduced to the main search page in May, 2009). You can choose more than one option to automatically narrow down your search. Another option Google could add is sorting by images with a Creative Commons license. It already does this in its advanced search options, but it is hidden there.
Yahoo and Bing have similar filtering options, Although Google’s color filter is the most advanced. It allows you to sort by 12 different colors, wheras Bing and Yahoo only let you sort by color or black-and-white images. Bing, however, does a better job with related searches, something Google is experimenting with in a slightly different way by actually trying to find And Yahoo has its own set of novel features in image search which Google doesn’t. You can compare the three with a search for “fruit” on Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Bing Images.
It’s not showing that new interface when I go there. Maybe it hasn’t been rolled out to all their datacenters yet. I still see the size and type dropdowns along the top where they’ve been for a while.
Elephant learns to dance. I wish to point out another change in google main search – ajax expandable ‘more results from same website’. One more demand, 10 blue links should be direct links to webpages, not goog redirects.
This is something goog should be doing, instead of throwing search money around on all other things except search.
lol…click more options
I didn’t see this feature when I just checked.
Same here. Nothing new yet.
You gotta click more options on the top right under Google
Whoops i meant top left lol
my bad
very nifty feature
If we could only improve a search for projector usb connector. Oh well, it is good to see the competition rolling along again.
I’ve had this one for a couple months now, and it has seriously changed my life. Being able to specify exact minimum size is awesome, as is the overall UI.
so any usecase?
As I was postulating [1] the other day on Twitter, this may explain the rise of “latex” result sets returned in otherwise benign web queries [2]
[1] Please, no euphemism jokes
[2] http://stevehan...index.php?id=63
And Bing still wins.
most definitely! i also find the interface clearner and earsier to use.
at bing, with searching for “fruit” you can also filter your search by people or faces so it will show people with fruits etc. it’s more robust with a better UI at bing.
so basically they copied bing
Amazing accuracy and very useful.
Search “black people”
Set type to “Faces”
Set color to red.
Perez is #8! http://bit.ly/DVYGc
Or set it Pink, and he’s #4.
Or set color to ‘black’ and Sarah Silverman is #12! But yet search ’sarah silverman’, type ‘faces’ & color to ‘red’ and Janet Jackson is #12! -no lie!! try it! What kind of search is this?! Oh well, the options are nice though, LOL. What’s next?! Search Janet Jackson, put color to ‘white’ – who’s gonna show up? – Milton Berle??
If they want to improve image search, fix safesearch so that schools and parents can keep their kids from allowing porn to show up by turning off safesearch (an easy two step process)
a lot of fix to be done still…
http://www.clickandporn.com
The Adult Tube Generation
I read your self promotion as “childandporn.com” and clicked it thinking it was some kind of internet content filter.
Thanks for the surprise.
you know..I always thought these website “snapshots” (that TechCrunch employs) were useless, but in the above case, I can see that something like that could’ve been really useful
But you still can’t find nude photos of google employees!
This just shows that Google is little different from Microsoft…
How long has it taken them to put search options on the left hand side?
And to copy Bing?
Or to even think of updating image search?
They are too focused on the backend and not enough on the front.
Some of this nonchalance/casual disregard/”we are too far ahead – who cares” has worked for them…
but not always for the consumer.
So happy Bing (Yahoo+Bing=BingOO) has brought a bit of competition.
Otherwise Google just looks so 1998/9 all the time!
no change here :O, I think Not updated globally yet
Hey Google, I will be at the GTUG meeting at the Googleplex in early August.
I just wanted to say that you should add geotagging filtering to image search. Like, say you want to find pictures that were taken by users in your city.
You should scan the longitude and latitude for that selected area and show the results.
Not very hard to implement, and very useful.
You may continue to conquer the planet earth now…
Scratch that, I am on the waiting list. I will be at the GTUG meeting in September. I RSVP’d too late to the camp out. If you can take me off the waiting list and let me go camp I would appreciate it. I loved IO 2009 and appreciate the shwag and my wave account very much.
Thanks!
I like Bing’s image search a whole lot more..especially the “pageless” navigation..the right image can be difficult to find, and clicking on “next page” can become very tedious (as it does in Google’s case)
Don’t sting.You are too late to S T I N G……
Google Image Search sucks. Too many unrelated results.
This is another cool option from Google.
interesting to see that the article doesn’t say anything about how all these features have been in Bing for quite sometime and maybe Google has copied from Bing… replace Google with Bing and viceversa and you’d expect quite a different article with 400+ comments of MS bashing
Thank god they updated the resolution options.. much better than bing and yahoo.. i was all about the bing image search until now.. Finally you don’t have to choose between small medium and large image sizes.. You really have a nice set of options there..
Competition is good.
I’m pretty happy with our own new search UI actually
:
http://www.zymm...search-results/
Nice filtering options, and thrilled by the speed of it
This thread should be called “Google Adds More USELESS Options To Image Search. For almost 10 years now, google image search limits results to just 20 per screen. Asinine. They overlook the obvious. They don’t have the bandwidth and/or processing to allow 200 image results per screen? Come on. Many, many google image search results are merely broken links. They don’t have code to automatically check links? Google idiots.
P.S. your blog causes incessant 100% cpu on known-good, usable, working, updated older computers such as the PIII. Please test your software and/or take responsibility to request that forum hosting owners TEST their software.