Google Images (previously Google Image Search) is a

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

owned by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

that allows users to search the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

for

image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

s. It was introduced on July 12, 2001 due to a demand for pictures of the

green Versace dress of Jennifer Lopez American entertainer Jennifer Lopez wore a green Versace silk chiffon dress to the 42nd Grammy Awards ceremony on February 23, 2000. The sheer fabric was printed with a tropical leaf and bamboo pattern, and cut with a very low neckline that ...

worn in February 2000. In 2011,

reverse image search Reverse image search is a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) query technique that involves providing the CBIR system with a sample image that it will then base its search upon; in terms of information retrieval, the sample image is very usefu ...

functionality was added. When searching for an image, a

thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image ...

of each matching image is displayed. When the user clicks on a thumbnail, the image is displayed in a larger size, and users may visit the webpage on which the image is used.

History

Beginnings and expansion (2001–2011)

In 2000,

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

results were limited to simple pages of text with links. Google's developers worked on developing this further, and they realized that an image search tool was required to answer "the most popular search query" they had seen to date: the

worn in February 2000. Google paired a recently hired engineer Huican Zhu with product manager

Susan Wojcicki Susan Diane Wojcicki ( ; born July 5, 1968) is a Polish-American business executive who is the CEO of YouTube. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022. Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over 20 years. She became invol ...

(now the current CEO of YouTube) to build the feature, and they launched Google Image Search in July 2001. That year, 250 million images were indexed in Image Search. This grew to 1 billion images by 2005 and over 10 billion images by 2010. In January 2007, Google updated the interface for the image search, where information about an image, such as resolution and

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

, was hidden until the user moved the

mouseover In computing, a mouseover, or hover box is a graphical control element that is activated when the user moves or hovers the pointer over a trigger area, usually with a mouse, but also possible with a digital pen. Mouseover control elements are co ...

its

. This was discontinued after a few weeks. On October 27, 2009, Google Images added a feature to its image search that can be used to find similar images. On July 20, 2010, Google made another update to the interface of Google Images, which hid image details until

. In May 2011, Google introduced a sort by subject feature for a visual category scheme overview of a search query. In June 2011, Google Images added a "Search by Image" feature which allowed for

es directly in the image search-bar without third-party add-ons. This feature allows users to search for an image by dragging and dropping one onto the search bar, uploading one, or copy-pasting a URL that points to an image into the search bar.

New algorithm and accusations of censorship (2012–present)

On December 11, 2012, Google Images' search engine algorithm was changed once again, in the hopes of preventing

pornographic Pornography (often shortened to porn or porno) is the portrayal of Human sexual activity, sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. Primarily intended for adults,

images from appearing when non-pornographic search terms were used. According to Google, pornographic images would still appear as long as the term searched for was specifically pornographic; otherwise, they would not appear. While Google stated explicitly that they were "not censoring any adult content", it was immediately noted that even when entering terms such as or "

Breast The breast is one of two prominences located on the upper ventral region of a primate's torso. Both females and males develop breasts from the same embryological tissues. In females, it serves as the mammary gland, which produces and secret ...

," no explicit results were shown. The only alternative option was to turn on an even stricter filter which would refuse to search for the aforementioned terms whatsoever. Users could also no longer exclude keywords from their searches. On February 15, 2018, the interface was modified to meet the terms of a settlement and licensing partnership with

Getty Images Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is an American visual media company and is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets— creative ...

. The "View image" button (a

deep link In the context of the World Wide Web, deep linking is the use of a hyperlink that links to a specific, generally searchable or indexed, piece of web content on a website (e.g. "http://example.com/path/page"), rather than the website's home page (e ...

to the image itself on its source server) was removed from image thumbnails. This change is intended to discourage users from directly viewing the full-sized image (although doing so using a browser's

context menu A context menu (also called contextual, shortcut, and pop up or pop-up menu) is a menu in a graphical user interface (GUI) that appears upon user interaction, such as a right-click mouse operation. A context menu offers a limited set of choice ...

on the embedded thumbnail is not frustrated), and encourage them to view the image in its appropriate context (which may also include attribution and copyright information) on its respective web page. The "Search by image" button has also been downplayed, as reverse image search can be used to find higher-resolution copies of copyrighted images. Google also agreed to make the copyright disclaimer within the interface more prominent. On August 6, 2019, the ability to filter images by their

image resolution Image resolution is the detail an image holds. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies how ...

s was removed, as well as "larger than", "face", and "full color" filters. The relevancy of search results has been examined. Most recently (October 2022), it was shown that 93.1% images of 390 anatomical structures were relevant to the search term.

Search by Image feature

Google Images has a Search by Image feature for performing

es. Unlike traditional

image retrieval An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as caption ...

, this feature removes the need to type in keywords and terms into the Google search box. Instead, users search by submitting an image as their query. Results may include similar images, web results, pages with the image, and different resolutions of the image. Images on Google may take anything between 2-30 days to index if they are properly formatted. The precision of Search by Image's results is higher if the search image is more popular. Additionally, Google Search by Image offers a "best guess for this image" based on the descriptive

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

of the results. In 2022 the feature was replaced by

Google Lens Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google, designed to bring up relevant information related to objects it identifies using visual analysis based on a neural network. First announced during Google I/O 2017, it was first ...

as the default visual search method on Google, and the Search by Image function remains available within Google Lens.

Algorithm

The general steps that Search by Image takes to get from a submitted image to returned search results are as follows: # Analyze image: The submitted image is analyzed to find identifiers such as colors, points, lines, and textures. # Generate query: These distinct features of the image are used to generate a search query. # Match image: The query is matched against the images in Google's back end. # Return results: Google's search and match algorithms return matching and visually similar images as results to the user.

References

External links

*
The Official Google BlogAdvanced Google Images Search Tips and Tricks
{{Google Inc.

Images An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

Image search 2001 software 2001 establishments in the United States