Google Image Swirl was an enhancement for an image-search tool in

Google Labs Google Labs was an incubator created by Google to test and publicly demonstrate new projects. It was online from early 2002 to mid-2011. Google described Google Labs as "a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototyp ...

. It was announced on the Google labs blog on November 17, 2009 with a limited number of search queries available. It was built on

Google image Google Images (previously Google Image Search) is a search engine owned by Google that allows users to search the World Wide Web for images. It was introduced on July 12, 2001 due to a demand for pictures of the green Versace dress of Jennifer Lo ...

search by grouping together images with similar visual and semantic qualities. It was suggested that such interface and grouping could help resolve queries that can have multiple types of results, are ambiguous, such as Apple, Jaguar, etc., and explore images associated with various viewpoints. This feature is no longer available.

Bing concurrence

In September 2009, a few weeks before Google Image Swirl appeared, Microsoft announced Bing Visual Search Beta. However, exploration of images with Bing requires an installment and use of the

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

browser with

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

. Bing Visual Search is available only in English.

Technical details

According to Google researchers Yushi Jing and Henry Rowley, and Aparna Chennapragada, Google Image Swirl leverages both the text information and the "visual" features associated with Web images (such as those developed for Google Similar Images) to determine how images should be grouped together.

Closure

As part of an effort to refocus attention on more refined products,

was shut down in 2011. As a result, Image Swirl was discontinued.Matt McGee (2011-08-09)

''Search Engine Land'', retrieved April 1, 2012

References

External links

Google Research Blog

ReadWriteWeb about Google Image Swirl

{{Google LLC Discontinued Google services, Image Swirl Image search