As basic as images are to the Internet it’s no surprise that Google’s approach to image search, born back in 2001, continues to evolve. Good thing too because it was always pretty slow going, plodding through pages of images results that didn’t really have what you wanted. Recently they added a link to “similar images” beneath some image results which will take you to an entire page of photos of the same place or subject. It’s better, but only incrementally so.
Today Google Labs launched Google Image Swirl, which uses new technology to gather images with common characteristics into groups, with an interesting interface that should greatly reduce the time it takes to find an image if you are looking for something specific. Now this is a leap.
The search will take you to a page of thumbnails as usual, except that you’ll see receding edges of photos underneath the top thumbnail. (The effect reminds me of Apple’s Time Machine interface.) Click on the thumbnail and you’ll be presented with a set or group of related photos or images. Interestingly, by clicking on peripheral images in the group, a whole new group of images will open up. Eventually clicking on an image will take you to the web page upon which the image resides, rather than drilling down further into new groups. I’ve probably made it sound really complicated, but it’s extremely intuitive and fast. It’s much, much faster this way to look through a lot of photos to find something good or exactly what you’re looking for.
Another smart feature is that at any time you can click on an earlier group or the results of your original image search. There is an echo of Google’s Wonder Wheel here. The technology is derived from Google Similar Images and Picassa face recognition that determines or discovers the relationships between all these images and sorts them into groups.
At the moment it only works for about 200,000 queries but it’s a fun taste of what’s to come. It’s experimental, you know the drill, but aside from the rather limited number of queries it can handle right now I found Google Image Swirl to be extremely usable and fairly comprehensive already.
