Use the Image Viewer Interface

When you do a normal Google search and then click a search result, you're sent to a web page. That's not how Google Image Search works. Instead, you're sent to an image viewer that gives you more information about the image and takes some actions on the image, as this task shows.

1. Click a Search Result

When you see an image that you want more information about or that you want to use, click the image thumbnail on the search results page.

2. Get Information About the Image

At the top of the page that appears, you find information about the image. You see a thumbnail of the image, the size of the image in pixels and kilobytes, and the URL of the web page on which the image is found. There also might be copyright information about the image. (For more information about images and copyright, see About Images and Copyright Law.

3. View the Image on Its Original Page

The bottom half of the page shows the image on the page on which it was found by Google. If you want more information about the image, it's a good idea to read through the page.

4. See the Full-Size Image

Click the See full-size image link located at the top of the image page to launch the image in its original size in a browser window.

5. Save the Image to Disk

To save the image to your computer's hard disk, right-click the image on its source web page or in the full-size browser window. From the context menu that appears, select Save Picture As. Then select the folder to which you want to save the picture and click Save to save it.

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Browse Through Image Search Results

When you do a search on Google Image Search, the search results are not the same as they are when you do a normal Google search. This task shows you how to browse through the results.

1. Go to Google Image Search
Get to the Google Image Search by going to http://images.google.com or by starting at the Google home page (www.google.com) and clicking the Images link just above the search box.

2. Type Your Search Terms
Google Image Search works like the normal Google search site, so type your search term or terms and press Enter or click Search Images.

3. Browse the Results
The search results page looks different from the normal Google results. You see thumbnails of pictures that match your search. Beneath each picture is information about the image, including the filename; the resolution of the image in pixels; the size of the image in kilobytes; and the site on which the image is found.

4. Sort Images by Size
After you've done your search, you can choose to show only those images of a certain sizesmall, medium, or large. From the Images Showing drop-down list box, select Large Images, Medium Images, or Small Images to specify which size images to display. Note that the image size in this context refers not to the size of the image in kilobytes, but to its resolution size.

5. Search Within Your Results
If you get too many search results, you can fine-tune your search by searching within your results. Scroll to the bottom of the results screen, and click the Search within results link located underneath the search box. A new page appears. Type your new search term (don't retype your original term), and you search within the original results.

6. Browse to the Next Page
As you can with any Google search results page, you can browse to the next page of results by clicking the Next button, located in the navigation area at the very bottom of the results page. Go to a specific page of results by clicking the page number you want to view (click the 1 to return to the first page of results), or click the Back button to go backward through multiple pages of results.

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About Finding Images with Image Search

Finding pictures with Google Image Search is much like finding anything on Google. As you can see in the nearby figure, the search interface is the same bare-bones search you've come to know and love for basic Google.

You perform a basic search for images in the same way you do a basic search on Google. Type your search terms (including any advanced search operators), and Google does its searching magic, combing through hundreds of millions of images to find one that matches that for which you're looking.


But some significant differences exist between using Google Image Search and using Google, and they have to do with the nature of images themselves.

In a normal Google search, Google looks through text it has indexed from hundreds of millions of web pages. Using a complicated series of rules, it decides which pages best match your search terms.

With images, though, things are different. An image is not made up of text; it contains no words. As smart a company as Google is, its search engine cannot examine a picture and know what it's a picture of. To Google, a picture of a zeppelin is no different than a painting by the Renaissance artist Caravaggio or a photograph of Hawaii. Basically, to Google, all three of these images are just bunches of bits.

So how can Google know what those pictures are if it can't decipher them? By using detective work that even Sherlock Holmes would envy. For a start, it looks at the image's filename. If the filename is Caravaggio.jpg, for example, there's a good chance that the image contained in the file is either a portrait of Caravaggio or a painting by Caravaggio.

Google also looks at the text near the image on a web page as well as at the text on the entire web page. Very frequently, web pages include a caption directly above, beneath, or next to an image. Google can associate that caption information with the image. In addition, other text on the web page itself provides more information about the image, and Google extracts that information as well. As an example, look at the nearby figure. The page is a biography of the painter Caravaggio and includes images of his paintings, with the names of the images and more information next to each painting.

So keep in mind when you're doing your Google Image Search that you're actually searching for information Google can find about each image. As you'll see in Perform an Advanced Image Search, this knowledge can help you better narrow your search.

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About Power Searching Strategies

Knowing how to do a search, how to do an advanced search, and how to use search operators goes a long way toward effective Google searching. But even knowing all that won't go all the way.

You need to combine all that technical information you acquired in the first tasks in this chapter with power searching strategiestechniques for crafting searches that give you results as close to possible to that for which you're searching.

Everyone has his own strategies for better searching, and so it's always a good idea to ask others for their ideas. But here are a few hints that should help you with your Google searches:

* Be specific The Web is an enormous place, containing literally billions of pages. Almost any search you do brings back far too much information. So make sure your search is as specific as possible. If you're looking for a history of the making of the album Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan, don't just search for "Blonde on Blonde". Try history "Blonde on Blonde" and you'll get better results.
* Be brief More is not always better when it comes to searching. Be as precise as possible with the terms you search for, and you'll get the best possible results. A short, precise search is much more effective than a rambling, imprecise one. So the search term history of castrati is better than history of castrati who were special boy child singers starting in 1600.
* Vary the order of search terms When you do a search, Google looks not only at the terms themselves, but at the order in which you type them. Google applies more weight to the first terms than it does to later terms in the search string. So use more important terms first. However, it's also worth trying to do a search that uses the same search terms, but with the order varied; rearranging your terms sometimes returns exactly the results you want.

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About Google Search Operators

Google enables you to search using search operators, special words and symbols that make it easy to get search results that match as closely as possible the information for which you're looking. You can combine search operators with search terms to form a query, like this:

• AND
You don't need to use this operator because Google adds it by default to searches in which you use multiple terms. It returns results that contain all the terms in the search. So a search for cow collagen (with the implied operator ANDcow AND collagen) returns only those pages in which both cow and collagen appear.

• OR
When you use this operator, Google returns pages on which any of the words are found. So a search for cow OR collagen returns pages in which the word cow appears and pages on which the word collagen appears. An OR search returns many more results than an AND search.

• +
The plus sign is called the inclusion operator and serves an interesting purposeit tells Google to use stop words in a search that it normally ignores. If you wanted to make sure that Google included the word to in a search (Google typically ignores this word when searching), put it in the search as + to. As with the inclusion operator, the plus sign must go next to the word (or next to the quotes surrounding a search phrase) you want to include; there can be no spaces between them.

• *
The asterisk is called a wildcard. For those who are familiar with searches on a computer, Google uses the asterisk in a search similarly to a computer wildcard search. The asterisk must be used in a quoted phrase, like this: "I * New York". When you use this character, Google returns pages that have any words in place of the * on them. A search for "I * New York" would return pages with I Love New York, I Hate New York, and so on.

• ~
The tilde is called the fuzzy operator or synonym operator. When you use this operator, Google searches for pages that contain the specified term as well as synonyms for the term. For example, a search for ~generous would return pages on which the word generous appears, as well those pages that contain synonyms of generous, such as munificent and charitable.

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