Jim Karpen Tips

August 2001

Google just seems to do everything better, recently adding image searching to its repertoire of search capabilities. This new function is labeled as "beta," meaning that it's still being developed. But from what I can tell, it's ready for prime time.

The database indexes over 150 million images from the web. When you search on a term, say "hawk," it returns a page of 20 small images, called thumbnails, which when clicked take you to the original image. Since no search engine is capable of looking at an image and saying what it is, and since no one is willing to take the time to look at 150 million images to see what the content is, the search engine simply searches for your term in the file name of the image.

For example, if you search on "hawk," you'll get images titled "hawk.jpg" and "hawk.gif." Some of these are indeed pictures of hawks, but you also get a wide range of images that aren't birds. These include aircraft with the name hawk, a Native American in a headdress, an athlete that's a member of a team called the hawks, and more. Still it's a useful tool and can be a quick way to find images.

The search results not only give you a thumbnail view of the original image but also information on the image size and the Internet address of the web page where the image was found. When you click on the thumbnail, it brings up a page that has a larger version of the thumbnail in a top frame and the original page in a bottom frame.

As with the regular Google search engine, you can tweak the preferences in several ways, for example, setting it so that it returns 100 thumbnails per page instead of 20.

Also, note that you can always exercise greater control over search results by using specific techniques. On Google and most other search engines, you can put a minus sign to exclude certain terms. Since a number of the images were of an aircraft named global-hawk, it's possible to eliminate them from the results by using this search string: hawk -global. (Make sure there's a space between the two words.)

Another useful way of controlling your searches is to use quotation marks to search for an exact match. Most search engines have now adopted this convention. When I used this search string to look for photos of hawks, I got a much better result: "hawk.jpg" -global.

There are actually quite a number of ways to get better search results, and we'll likely cover these in a future column. But the two I mention above are often the most useful.

© 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#280)