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images.google.com
Ever since Scour faded from the surface of the net, finding a good source of images has been tought to do. Fortunately Google has stepped up to the plate by working on an Image Search Engine. A variety of people submitted it, and although it is in beta testing, it seems quite functional and very cool.
I wish you could search by something besides filename and keywords. A shape based search like Eikon ( http://f.neonap.net:8080 ) would be nice.
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I look through photo.net to find random images for websites. Although most of the photos on there are not free (in the GNU sense), they do store copyright permissions for each image so you can check. (I haven't yet found a way to filter searches so only free images show up.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Until now, it hasn't really been important to choose meaningful filenames for images. But now you should make sure to pick long, descriptive names (probably with lots of underscores) so that Google will find them.
Also if Google uses 'alt text' to help the search, that's another good reason to add it to your images.
I wonder whether they will apply the page-ranking algorithm to client-side imagemaps with 'label' text?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They already do scale the images down; I'm just saying they could make them a little smaller. Or at least provide that as an option.
If they're currently generating thumbnails on the fly, it wouldn't be any slower to generate them a bit smaller. If they're currently saving the thumbnails to disk, a complementary set of extra-small thumbnails would take hardly any extra disk space (perhaps 20% as much).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
As a modem user I would like an option for smaller thumbnails. Something like a 64x48 maximum size, reduced to 16 colours or fewer would be good. Then you could display all the matching results on a single page without it getting too big - another good thing for modem users (clicking through pages of results is too painful).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Cool ... if you ask for pictures of Bill Gates,
the top two lines have several versions of the
mug shot from when he was busted in New Mexico
in his early 20s.
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Even better ... A search, with the porn filter off, on PUBLIC SEX brings up the FSF's GNU sketch ... hmm ...
Image search engines are only as reliable as the image metadata they query, and without consistent schema for decribing images beyond file type, they will never really work. And a workable schema of that kind would either take an eternity to type in or be inconsistent and probably both. The inability of a computer to truly make associations between visual images on anything like a real-world level is a key reason why we will NEVER, EVER get a computer with the (humanlike) intelligence and verisimilitude of HAL 9000 or Haley Joel Osment in "A.I." Computers are deaf and blind; always have been.
In the meantime, I love the inefficiencies of image search engines, because it let's you play an oftentimes hilarious random association game. Because Google's engine relies on text info including file names and nearby captions and other content, the mix of things it thinks applies to your search term can be inadvertently very entertaining.
Hey, it is still in beta; I'm sure they'll add support for other languages in due course.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I can't see commercial porn sites caring, to be honest. After all, they all require you to login, and so google isn't going to get anything at all from them (unless they start buying accounts, which would go down like a lead balloon...)
They might be a little miffed that this will make it easier for people to find the stuff they want for free, but so what? Them's the breaks; if you charge people for something they can get for free elsewhere, don't expect to make too much money.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Can't seem to find it. (Do you dare to click that link?.
Lycos already provides such a facility. You can check it out at http://www.lycos.com/l/?2i.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It seems it bases the matches on name and content on the page.
Try searching for cmdrtaco, I laughed my ass off at some of the stuff.
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It would be very helpful to be able to sort by image size (number of pixels, width times height). If I search for something that returns many hits, I usually have to crawl through tons of images that are hardly larger than a thumbnail and only rarely there is a large picture to be found. That's natural, because most images on the web are small, but sorting would help and the information is already there in their database.
Another suggestion that is easy to implement - make it possible to search for files in a certain format only. JPEG is typically used for photos, so you will get much less graphics if you restrict your search to JPEG (or vice versa).
An additional service that comes to mind is OCR - for several topics I found a surprisingly large number of newspaper scans. Google could use the text detected in the image to even further increase the search quality.
Also, I hope they're using meta data. It's not there very often, but all major file formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF) have the ability to store text or even more finegrained information (date, location, etc., think of JPEG/EXIF).
A more complex extension would be query by example. You send up an image, they list images that look the same. This is much more powerful than mere text, but it works in a very different way.
Did you notice?
There is also a Google Linux Search Engine (even a penguin logo)
There's also a Google BSD Search Engine (with daemon) and a Google Apple Mac Search Engine (with fruity colors) too.
Surprisingly absent (or not!?) is a search engine for that other operating system...
I didn't do a search for the poster, but for the picture I want on the poster. I KNOW the web has a picture I want because I have seen it many times before. If I do a search for "barney sidecar" I find the pic I'm looking for (on a mug and a t-shirt). The problem is that I have to know it is called the barney sidecar picture even though he is clearly not in the sidecar, but on the bike. In the Andy Griffith episode he may have ridden all over the place in the sidecar with someone, but on the pic he is on the bike.
IANAL, but I play one on
The first search was for "dog on a bike" just to look for a very obscure and odd picture item. Lo and behold, the 15th or so picture is of a dog sitting on a motorcycle. I was really excited at how well it worked. The rest were pictures of either dogs and/or bikes, which is understandable.
Next search was for "standing in the rain" to find a common picture of a specific scenario. The results were not so good. I did find pictures of people standing in the rain, but I found more drawings and things that had nothing to do with rain.
Next I played around with the 'mature content filter' and searched for "bath tub." I got about 20000 pictures of bath tubs and showers and the like, but not one porn pic. Although I guess this is good if you're shopping for bath tubs, it did miss a large segment of people looking for pics of women in a bath tub. I'm sure if you did a search for "hardcore porn", you'd find hardcore porn, but I'm at work and I'd get in trouble for doing that.
The final search was for a SPECIFIC picture that would make this search engine pretty useful. My father is looking for the poster of Barney Fife sitting on a big motorcycle. It's a funny poster, but we haven't found it anywhere (I have found the picture at some sites, just not the poster). I did multiple searches for "barney fife," "fife bike," "fife motorcycle," barney motorcycle,"... you get the picture. Almost every picture that came up was a banner-ad type picture advertising different websites. Only when I searched for just "barney fife" did I find pictures of barney fife. Otherwise, I would ONLY get little icons and other useless graphics. No motorcycles or barneys at all. I even got a graphic for an anti-DVD website.
The useless graphics and icons were prevalent in every search I did. I'm guessing if you're searching for a graphic of something like a smiley face, this would be helpful. Otherwise, it was only marginally interesting.
IANAL, but I play one on
I might as well provide Taco with a link to help him out. KaZaA (despite the gay name) has all the functionality of scour, plus some.
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I just took three minutes and found something I could use...
-- I'm not evil, I'm
Much as I loathe adult filters, I wish they had one for this service, just so I don't get the random fellatio image on my screen at work.
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THe one thing that I like this over images.altavista.com is a frickin' DIRECT LINK to the image in question.
With altavista.com, you have to go to the actual web page, which sometimes doesn't even have the iamge. I'm assuming its because the web page in question has changed over time(since it was last indexed by altavista), or is such a heavily dynamic website, you'll have to scrounge thru the site to get it.
With google, it's just TWO clicks away to steal someone else's work. I'm happy. Again, google rules for search engines.
AltaVista
Corbis
Ditto.com
Lycos
Photos To Go
Diggit!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been wanting to write an open sourced image search engine for a long time, I guess that now I can just try to join the google team.
One idea that I had was to use optical character recognition (like many scanners do) to pull out possible words... much like the portrayal of Neo when he was searching for Morpheus.
This is a technology that can widely expand the usefulness of searching tools, but can also invade people's privacy. Let's say that your local paper publishes your photo... now anyone in the world can see what you look like.
- passion
This is indeed very cool; I've been starved for clip-art for a Scoop site I'm running, and easily found a lot of images that I could use. But doesn't this technology make it a little too easy to steal copyrighted work? The images are provided out of context with no instructions about appropriate use. People would probably quite naturally think the images were free for the taking, especially when removed from their home pages.
I'd love to use some of the images I found right away, but know that I probably shouldn't, or that at least I should research each one individually and try to find out what its appropriate use/copyright status is. But Most People(tm) won't do that, and I wonder if this is going to lead to some kind of Napster-like backlash.
Maybe we need to develop an XML "copyright_status='public-domain'" attribute for images, and try to get people to use it? (Sure, that'll happen.)
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Webcore Labs arbitrairlly limits distribution at it's sole discretion.
Webcore Labs arbitrairlly limits use at it's sole discretion.
The software is not free because:
It may not be used for any purpose, at the discretion of Webcore Labs.
It may not be transfered without Webcore Labs permision.
It almost certianly can not be modified.
It would be unwise to include use any of their images without modification. I prefer to make my own images when I need them or use truely free images.
Prohibition of sale != GPL. Sell what you want, just distribute the source code and don't tell people what they can and can not do with their computers.
Thank you for presenting this piece of their liscence. I don't agree with the way they like to share things.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
People are submitting what they saw on "The Screensavers" last nite? Mercy. I thought Slashdot drove their content, not the other way around.
What's next? Barking cats?
Keep in mind that there is also IStockPhoto. All images are free for use, similar to the GPL.
Beware tpb
Hmm. Probably 90% of the searches on this will be porn. Seriously, how often do you want to search for some other specific picture?
:-)
The commercial porn websites won't like it, and Google will have a hard time justifying this service for hunting down porn. I just don't see it making financial sense. (something Google is pretty good at understanding)
So in other words, grab all the pics you can now.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
A friend of mine writes image-recognition code for Ditto (formerly Arriba Vista). They've been providing this same service for over 2 years.
Google is amazing, and I'm sure that their search will be better eventually (if it isn't already), but this is a difficult field, and it's nice to have options. Give them a look.
"We all say so, so it must be true!"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
While Google caches both summaries and full length webpages, they only seem to cache thumbnails for the images. It would be really nice if they also cached the full size image.
Imagine what you could find for "CmdrTaco" or "JonKatz" through this amazing search engine? Naked photos? Embarassing drunken pee-pee shots? Oh yes. All this and more....
thelocust[dot]org
Excellent... a resource that was really needed!
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Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
Recognizing images by their name is rather inaccurate though, I wonder if there's some manual editing involved, or if they use ImageMagick or something to try and determine the pictures contents by pattern matching ;) (more than 40% greens == probably a landscape photo...)
^]:wq!^M
Much as I loathe adult filters, I wish they had one for this service, just so I don't get the random fellatio image on my screen at work.
They do have an adult filter in place, on the search result page it would appear where you can see the results without it on. Obviously it's not perfected, though.
"And like that
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most annoying is that it finds a mess of images with weirdo domain names my DNS has never heard of (and it's heard of a _lot_!)
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Click and vote him UP!!!
Can Google display the full image with just one click? Why does it take two?
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Oh bother.
I don't know how many times I've spent hours (on my connection) trying to find a tolkien image, or a cool desktop theme. I am pleased that once again Google has stepped up to the plate and beat the competition. I'm interested to see where else the net takes us as these "dotcommers" fall away and truly intuitive people keep the industry fun.
This is not a Fugazi
I'm hoping that they're having temporary server problems or something; I've really come to love the "Found 123,456,789 results in 0.11 seconds" speed; a server (okay, a massive cluster of them) can find thousands and thousands of links, put them in dynamically generated webpages, and send them to me, on teh opposite side of teh US - in less time than it takes me to read my hard drive!
Hehe, searching for things like "bob" produces interesting results; it's pictures of a ton of people named Bob. And a hand coming out of an apple...
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suwain_2
why doesn't google link to this from google.com? They don't have a link to groups.google.com on their main page either! I understand they're going for the "simple" look, and thats cool, but shouldn't they have some little text links somewhere on the front page? I only know about both these services because of /.! Granted, they are reaching a decent audience this way, but they ought to mention it on google.com.
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The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Not sure I like that at all.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
The cunt coloring book was my favorite.
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http://multimedia.alltheweb.com/ has been around for a long time now, more than a year I think.
I get a javascript error on CreativePro.com so I can't comment on how well it works...
I think the point is that the Google service is searching the whole web (well, as much as it can) for images rather than an archive of stock images.
PORN!
No, wait. Too obvious.
This is cool - almost as cool as FTP search engines. I'm really surprised it's taken this long for another search engine to replicate scour, given the drive to differentiate yourself from all the other search engines out there.
I put picturefuse together after I saw the opendirectory project. It is a free digital archive with a public and private gallery.