Google Advanced Image Search - How to use it

When it comes to searching images online, Google provides one of the best ways to do it: the Google Advanced Image Search feature. You shouldn’t be surprise, as it’s more than normal for the biggest and most used search engine out there to have image and video search capabilities. And since the WWW is now full of millions of quality digital photos, a tool to sort them and make them accessible to the internauts had to be developed.

Today we are going to take a look at this Google Advanced Image Search thingy, as there are lots of options there and most of you might not know exactly what each of them does.

First of all, where can you find Google Advanced Image Search? Simple, just type: http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search in your browser. Now, don’t be scare of the spartan interface that is going to appear. Just get some time familiarizing with it and read the following explanations of each option. In time, you’ll learn to love it and use it every time you need to search for pictures, as this Google Advanced Image Search is fast, reliable and quite precise.

Now let’s see the options:

1. Google Advanced Image Search Find Options

   •  Find results related to all of the words: simply type keywords in here and press search. You will get results related to all the keywords you searched. This should be used for general searches only.
   • Find results related to the exact phrase: for more exact results, type the keywords in here and you will get results related to the exact phrase you are looking for. Those results should be more satisfying than the one provided with the general search.
   • Find results related to any of the words: if you want to find pictures related to a couple of words but not to all of them (or combinations), just use this option. Could be used for specific term searches, where there might not be many pictures, so it could be useful to add a couple of synonyms in the pot.
   • Find results not related to the words: although this field might seem useless, it can come in handy when you’re searching for a keyword with several meanings: you can restrict the search to what you want by providing synonyms to the other meanings of the keyword in this field.

2. Google Advanced Image Search Filters

   • Content types: returns images according to their content. What each of the radio buttons does is kind of self explanatory: 1. any content 2. news content 3. faces
   • Size: return images according to their size that you can select from the drop-down list: extra large, large, medium, small, any size.
   • Filetypes:   you can choose from this drop-list the format of your results, between BMP, JPG, GIF and PNG.
   • Coloration: this is quite an interesting filter, as it allows you to get images according to their colors: black and white, gray-scale or full color. Of course, if you have the full color version of a picture you can always transform it in grayscale or B&W with any image editing software, but why bother if you can get them already formatted?
   • Domain: an option useful for webmasters or for the ones trying to find only the pictures from a specific domain. All you have to do is type that domain in this field.

3.    Google Advanced Image Search SafeSearch

   • SafeSearch is kind of an advanced filter allowing you to screen the results, according to the level of filtering you select. Very useful for the cases when your kids are around and you don’t want any disturbing results to pop up on your screen. The filters only work with explicit content and texts, so the algorithm could be improved. But hey, it’s a start.

That’s it. I have to say that an experienced webmaster can learn how to use some of these options above (but not all of them) from the simple Google Images search page with the help of some simple commands. Let’s see how:

1. Google Advanced Image Search Find Options

   • Find results related to all of the words: Search phrase: die hard
   • Find results related to the exact phrase: Search phrase: "die hard"
   • Find results related to any of the words: Search phrase: die OR hard
   • Find results not related to the word: Search phrase: "die hard -bruce -willis" (results from die hard minus things related to bruce and willis)

2. Google Advanced Image Search Filters

   • Content types: -
     
   • Size: -
     
   • Filetypes: Search phrase: die hard filetype:png
   • Coloration: -
   • Domain: Search phrase: die hard site:imdb.com (shows only results from imdb.com)

3.    Google Advanced Image Search SafeSearch

   • -

In the end, whether you choose to use the Google Advanced Image Search or the Google Image Search feature, one thing is for sure: using Google is one of the easiest ways to find digital pictures online.

Tags: Google, how to, image, Search