Much like with email, and obviously search in general (although the market share doesn’t dictate such obviousness), the competition between Google and Yahoo seems to be heated on the image search front as well. Maybe “heated” is the wrong word, but you know what I mean.
Yahoo has recently made some improvements, and now Google is offering up a nice feature of its own in allowing you to choose more types of results you are looking for when you use Google Image Search. Sean O’Malley, Software Engineer, Google Image Search writes on the Official Google Blog:
Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren’t in a style that’s useful to you. So some time ago we launched face search, which lets you limit your search results to only images containing faces (see a search without and with this option). More recently we also rolled out photo search, which limits results to images that contain photographic elements, ignoring many cartoons and drawings which may not be useful to you (see a search without and with this option).
Today we’re pleased to extend this capability to clip art and line drawings. To see the effect of these new options, let’s take a look at the first few results for “Christmas,” one of our most popular queries on Image Search right now.
Photo content
Clip art
Line drawing
The options you have to choose from in a Google Image search now include: any content, news content, faces, clip art, line drawings, and photo content. This is a very helpful feature that enhances the usability of Google Image Search, and should help searchers find the results they are looking for much more quickly, in some instances saving them from scrolling through page after page of results until the desired result is retrieved.
