At a press conference Monday Google announced a few enhancements to it’s search facilities, one of them across Images.
Google say: “Whether you type, speak or upload a photo, once you’ve indicated what you’re looking for the next step in your search is to sift through the results and pick one. To make this faster, last year we introduced Google Instant, which gives you search results while you type. We estimated Google Instant saves you between two and five seconds on typical searches. But once you’ve picked a result, you click, and then wait again for the page to load for an average of about five seconds.”
UPDATE: Search By Image is now available in the UK: Photoarchivenews.com have tested the system over a few random images and it works Very Very Well!! – try it here:https://images.google.com
Industry reaction: a UK magazine picture editor emailed PAN: “This should make finding the originator of certain images a bit easier. Sometimes I’ve wasted the best part of a day trying to find out the copyright holder, it’s almost as if some photographers are trying to get you to rip them off….There was this one case of these images of a pigeon that had been attacked, it was still alive but pretty badly cut up, spent best part of a day trying to track down the photographer, no metadata. Phoned bird magazines etc, photographers, going through websites, blog sites etc. Couldn’t run them in the end.”
UPDATE: full detailed look at ‘Search By Image’ here: google.com/insidesearch/
