Optimize Your Image Search
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Keywords
Image searching in Google is less complex than Web searching and is fun in different ways. For example, you can search for pictures of people you haven’t seen in years, for postcard-like images of travel destinations, or for pictures of yourself.
Google’s task is a tricky one. It must match your keyword(s) with pictures — a far harder task than matching words with text. At best, Google can make educated guesses about the identity or subject matter of a picture based on the file name of the picture, the URL address of the image, the surrounding text, and any caption. So the results are bound to be erratic. Fortunately, Google errs on the side of abundance, delivering truckloads of possible photos and other images in response to your keywords.
Simple searches are identical to Web searches. From the Google home page, lick the Images tab, enter a keyword or two, and press Enter. You can even use the site, intitle, allintitle, inurl, and allinurl operators described in the preceding section when searching for images. It’s in the search results that things differ from Web searches. Image results come in the form of thumbnails — small versions of images. Click any thumbnail to see a larger version of the image, along with the Web page on which it resides. Google reproduces the image above the Web page containing the image — arguably a big waste of space. (Click the Remove Frame link at the top right of the page to get rid of it.) This second reproduction of the image is usually a thumbnail, too, albeit a somewhat larger one. You may click this thumbnail to see a full-size version of the picture. Or you can scroll down the page to see the picture in context.
In November 2004, some enterprising Google users began making noise about not being able to find images of the Iraq war in Google Images. They made enough noise to prompt a confession from Sergey Brin, one of Google’s founders. “We are embarrassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be,” Sergey stated. “Expect a refresh in the near future.” Indeed, the update came along, but the currency of Google Images was damaged. On the day I wrote this paragraph, Google Images failed to display a picture of the iPod Shuffle, a wildly popular MP3 player introduced two months earlier. If you can’t find a current events photo in Google Images, try performing a photo search in the Google Web index, which turns up photos when asked for them. Use the word photos in your keyword string. This trick sometimes works, but not always — indeed, it failed to show the Shuffle.
Advanced Image Searching
As with Web searches, Google provides a collection of enhanced search tools on the Advanced Image Search page (see Figure 2-9). Follow these steps to reach that page:
1. Go to the Google home page.
2. Click the Images tab.
3. Click the Advanced Image Search link
The Find results portion of the Advanced Image Search page is nearly identical to the Advanced Search page for Web searches. The difference is that the keyword modifiers here relate to images by matching file names, captions, and text surrounding the images. Use the keyword boxes to add search modifiers to your keywords, but don’t expect exact textual matches as with a Web search because images are not text.
Below the Find results portion of the Advanced Image Search page are five settings that determine the type and location of the images you are seeking:
_ Size: Use the drop-down menu to restrict your search to images of certain sizes. Admittedly, the choices are vague: icon-sized, small, medium, large, very large, and wallpaper-sized. By themselves, these choices are nearly meaningless. They refer generally to image dimensions, not file size. A wallpaper-sized picture can be contained in a smaller file size than a medium picture.
_ Filetypes: Use this drop-down menu to select JPG, GIF, or PNG files. As a practical matter, these file formats are nearly interchangeable. Whatever you plan to do with your found images, you can probably do equally well with any one of those three types. Accordingly, I always leave this feature set to its default, which is any filetype.
_ Coloration: Here you can choose to locate black-and-white pictures, grayscale images, or full-color art. Full-color images are usually the largest file sizes.
_ Domain: Use this keyword box to specify a Web domain that you want to search for images. This is a helpful way to search online newspaper graphics.
_ SafeSearch: With the three SafeSearch options, you can determine the level of filtering Google will apply to your image search. The choices are identical to the SafeSearch preference settings, but apply to only one search at a time. In nearly all cases, the images you find through Google are owned and implicitly copyrighted by other people. There is some buzz among copyright scholars about the capability of search engines to display other people’s property on demand. Google itself puts a little copyright warning about using the images dished up in its search results. If you’re wondering whether you can download and apply a photo as desktop wallpaper, for example, the quick legal answer is no in most cases. The search results are meant to be informational, and Google is not intended as a warehouse of downloadable images. How you choose to approach online intellectual property is your business, but respect for the property of others strengthens the online community. Besides, in Google of all places, it’s not too hard to find images whose owners invite downloads. Try using the keywords public domain or free download on the Advanced Image Search page to find images that you can legally reuse. You may use search operators in Google Images, just as you do in Google Web searches. Some Web search operators, such as intext and info, don’t apply to images. The best image operators to use are
_ intitle: Find photos in Web pages that contain certain keywords in the page titles.
_ filetype: Use this operator to find certain image file types, specifically JPG, GIF, and PNG. (Most people find no practical value in discriminating between these file types.)
_ inurl: Find images in Web pages whose URLs contain your keywords.
_ site: Restrict your image search to certain site domains or specific pages.
These operators help narrow a search but do not eliminate the fundamental problem, which is that most photos posted online are not named in a way that allows Google to easily identify them or match them with intelligent keywords. Constant experimentation and persistence are required.
