News in Image Searching: Google Image Swirl

Google has changed how we search for images, or rather… how we find images we can use. By introducing features such as similar images, you can find more images that relate to the type of photo you are interested in from the search results. A cool new feature gracing Google Labs, is Google Image Swirl.

Google Image Swirl is very similar in function to the similar images function, in the sense that it groups related images together. However, it does so in an image cloud, or as Google calls it, a swirl.

From this collection of images, you can select the group of related images you are interested in. You can then further refine your search, by selecting a new image from the swirl of images you selected at first, and so on, until you find the perfect picture.

I decided to, well, take this feature for a swirl, and tested it out searching for images that would hit home for me: the CN Tower in Toronto.

To search images and easily select the perfect one, follow these steps:

1. Surf to Google Image swirl and enter your query.
2. Hit enter, or search
3. A results page will show up with neatly sorted images, grouped by images related to each other:
4. Say that, for example, you could care less for the actual CN tower, but you are looking for images of the CN Tower’s famous glass floor. On the top right, a group of images of the view from the floor is stacked up together.
5. Clicking on the image will bring up a cloud of related images:
6. Then, you can proceed to click on other images within the cloud, to refine your search further. For example, I’ve selected the image on the top right to generate the following cloud:
7. After clicking on the picture, you can see a new cloud forming, and the previous ones are still visible but become smaller and are located to the right of the new image search results:
8. You can basically keep going until you find what you are looking for.

To develop image swirl, Google used similar concepts used for Picasa face recognition and similar images. Although I used the CN tower as an example, I’ve replicated the search for a term I use reasonably frequently, and was amazed! I managed to find a great image within seconds, where previously I’ve sorted through pages and pages of image results after a query.

Let me know what you think of Google image swirl, I’m really curious to see your comments!