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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.
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.
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
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.