3 Awesome Image Search Tricks for More Useful Results
Although Google Image Search is still the best and most comprehensive search tool for images, it can still be hard to pick through the results for the perfect picture.
As long as you have a rough idea in your mind of the type of picture you are looking for, there are three tricks you need to be aware of when using Google Image Search. Without a doubt they’ll make finding the perfect image a whole lot faster!
1. Search pictures of people
The all-knowing Google can figure out whether a picture has faces – hence people – in it or not. That means when you’re looking for ‘Business’, but only want pictures with business people in them, you simply stick on &imgtype=face to the end of the search URL. This will filter out all pictures without people in them, and you will go from this search result:
To this:
2. Filter for News Items Only
If you’re looking for pictures of a particular event, you can narrow your search to news items only. You’ll have to go into the advanced search page and select ‘news content’.
3. Search by Style
When you know you need a cartoon, or even a line drawing, you don’t need all those photographs Google Search gives you. Recently, Google made it possible to filter out only particular types of images. There are three options to choose from:
You can select either of these options using the drop down menu just below the search bar in Google Image Search.
The function can be a true life-saver if you have a pinching deadline and need some clip art to spice up a presentation.
Another Cool Thing you can do with Image Search
A picture tells more than a thousand words, and Lifehacker has a creative suggestion on how you can put Google Image Search to some good use: next time you hear or read an obscure word (for example, in a recipe) and have no idea what the item looks like, do a search and you’ll know what to look for.
This can work for anything: whether you don’t want to look like an idiot because you don’t know what a ‘wristlet’ is (but maybe your girlfriend wants one for Christmas!), or you need some mysterious ingredient for a recipe.
What do you think about these new search options? Will they be useful to you?
Another use for image search is when you’re dealing with a person who has a name that you don’t recognise and are not sure if they are male or female. Simply pop the name into image search and see the corresponding results. This has saved me more than once.
Hi Phil,
You’re right! I’ve done that before as well! Thanks for sharing.
Christine