Search For Web Images At Google.com

By: Charles Bowen For the longest time, images made up the largest uncharted territory on the Internet. While the World Wide Web always has been graphic to its very core, search engines didn't seem to know what to do with all those photos, drawings, maps, charts, and film clips. If you found an illustration you sought, it usually was simply by chance, probably because it was incorporated in an article or Web site that the search engine already had indexed.

In recent years, several valiant attempts have been made to try to bring searchability to the Net's rich storehouses of graphics, but most of the projects have collapsed under the weight of the data. Now at last a premiere name in Net search engines has tackled the job, and we're all the benefactors.

Google has unveiled a beta version of its new image search engine, probably the most comprehensive on the Web, indexing more than 150 million graphics. Enter a keyword to receive pages of 20 thumbnail pictures each. All thumbnails include image size information and the URLs of the images' source pages. Click a thumbnail to see a framed page with a larger image of the thumbnail above the link to the full page on which the image was found.

Better still, all of Google's usual advanced search commands also are available with image search, and you can limit your search to a specific file format. Google uses a fuzzy logic retrieval system that works by matching search terms to the titles of image files or to adjacent text. In other words, it really doesn't matter what the image is about. It is the label that counts.

To use the resource, visit the site at http://images.google.com, where a simple introductory page invites you to enter a search term. You also can reach the image search engine by clicking the "Advanced Search" link at the main Google site (http://www.google.com) and scrolling the resulting display.

Next, page through the thumbnails of images matching your query. Clicking any thumbnail produces a larger version of the image and the URLs of their source pages. Advanced searching also is possible. For instance:

o To search for images with a specific file type (such as JPEGs, GIFs, etc.), enter your search term in the data entry box, followed by "filetype:" and the format you are interested in. So, if you were looking for Delta Queen images in GIF format, you could enter "Delta Queen filetype:GIF."

o You can use all Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) in your image searches, as in "baseball AND football."

o And the expanded Google searches you already may be accustomed to from text searches are available in the image search engine too. Of particular interest is the Site: delimiter. To use the example from Google's FAQ file, to find all the pictures of lemurs at the Duke Primate Center, the query would be "Site:duke.edu lemurs."

Other considerations for using the Google Image Search in your research, writing, and editing:

1. If you report on the Google Image Search in your news columns, you might want to mention the search engine's "adult content filter." The search engine uses the filter on your initial search, removing many adult images automatically. However, Google adds it cannot guarantee that all such content with be filtered out.

2. To turn off the content filter, click the toggle switch that displays beneath the search box on search results pages. Once the mature content filter is turned off, it stays off for the rest of that session and remains off on the next visit to the search engine.

3. If you find copyrighted images in the search engine that you want to remove, visit www.google.com/remove.html, where you'll find instructions on contacting the site's operators.