Google Image search is amazingly accurate

mishrashubham

Google image search is the best place when searching for images on something. But I have always thought, "What if I have an image and I need to find out what it is about." Shazam works well for audio, but Google has finally done it with images. I noticed a week ago that you could drop images in the search box and google would find sites which have the same image. I find this pretty cool, since I have always wanted to know which painting Evo's avatar was, and now I finally know.

http://images.google.com/search?tbs=...h=643&biw=1366
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lad...lott_(painting)

arildno

What HAS the world come to??

That, once upon a time, the mirror cracked from side to side evokes no recognition or grief in the younger generation..

The curse be upon them.

FlexGunship

Google text search still works, too.

Loreena McKennitt "The Lady of Shalott"

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...w=1207&bih=750
http://katebush.proboards.com/index....nt&thread=1997

zoobyshoe

What's the procedure for dropping an image in the search box? I want to try this.

FlexGunship

Go here: http://www.google.com/imghp (Google image search)
Choose an image:


(Source: http://www.aerospaceguide.net/saturn_5.html)

Then drag it into the search box.

zoobyshoe

I don't understand how to get it from your post to google.

FlexGunship

EDIT: See the mouse cursor? Can you tell that I'm dragging and dropping?

Proton Soup

meh. i've not been too impressed with it. tried it out when people were first talking about it. it's pretty good on exact matches. when it gets confused, it starts throwing back images with similar color scheme. which is probably a key to reverse engineering what they did. i think they just noticed that you could key on something like a histogram of the color palette and get it right most of the time. quick and dirty, efficient as anything, but not terribly intelligent (in the AI sense).

zoobyshoe

What are you doing at google such that it says "drop image here"?

I tried dragging and dropping my avatar and all it did was take me to my profile page here rather than search for images like my avatar.

Evo

The instructions page says there is supposed to be a camera icon in the search bar. My search bar is empty, and I have a supported browser.

zoobyshoe

Oh. I have the camera icon. I clicked on it and finally was able to drop an image. The "related images" were all over the place; related in some abstract sense only. Regardless, I think it would be a good way to find the name or origin of an image you aren't familiar with, provided that image is on the web somewhere.

DaleSwanson

Note, you need to be on google image search page, not just the google home page:
http://www.google.com/imghp

Also, TinEye has provided a similar function for a while. Although, I suspect google will quickly beat them in terms of images indexed (if they haven't already).
http://www.tineye.com/

If you use Firefox, and are interested in reverse image lookups there's an extension called "Who stole my pictures" that lets you simply right click on an image and then search for it in google or tineye, or a couple others I've never heard of.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...e-my-pictures/

DaveC426913

Yup. Apparently I

look just like



or



or



Apparently, I look like a babe or a boob.

Evo

I don't get the camera icon. I even clicked on their direct link to "try it now" from the image instruction page.

rootX

I am a happy dog!

mishrashubham

Apart from this I also think there are some very pattern recognition algorithms at work. Apparently the drop and search function only works with Chrome and Firefox. In IE 8 you need to click the camera icon and browse for the image on your HDD or paste the image url. But in Opera, the camera icon does not appear even after clicking "Try it now" on the google image site.

FlexGunship

You went to the regular Google search page. Go to Google image search.

For anyone trying this, try using Chrome. Not only is it (pretty much) the best browser available, it does have native support for a lot of Google goodies (like playing Angry Birds directly in your browser).