I had the displeasure of dealing with a virus-infected Windows XP machine over the weekend. This virus was a browser hijacker, but it functioned for all web browsers (Firefox, IE and Chrome were used to test this theory) and essentially intercepted and re-wrote Google results to point to spammy sites which seemed to only exist to earn ad revenue. The interesting thing is the infection vector – this hijack managed to infiltrate the system through Acrobat Reader and a known security hole which has yet to be patched (as far as I am aware, anyway).
Google Labs is an infrequently updated part of Google that showcases new or interesting things that Google are working on. One thing that was of interest to me recently was the Similar Images search feature. This will allow you to search for a term using the normal Google image search, but adds the option to click on a link next an image and view more images that look like this one. For example, lets say you wanted to search for images of London, you can click on images of the London Eye and see different images of the same thing. Here is the official video from Google.
I thought I would have a play with this feature and see what I could do with it. One thing I always have trouble finding is an image of a mouse cursor. When I am writing user manuals I like to have the cursor in the image so that the user can see where they are mean to click. So after a image search for cursor I found the following results.
Google Image Search For Cursor
I then clicked on the similar link for the 6th image along on the second row and got the following page.
Google Image Search Similar Images
As you can see the feature if nearly there. From this page of images quite a few are indeed cursors, but the majority are not at all like the original image. For some reason Google seems to like to display images of cupid for this particular search.
I had more success when I tried searching for logos, which I presume if because they look quite alike. Searching for the logos of Wordpress, BBC, and Microsoft gave some good results.
So the big question is Will this become part of the main image search? I think the answer is probably yes. There are a quite a few products and features developed over the years that have become live, such as Gmail and iGoogle, so I think that we could very well see this feature appearing on normal Google image search results. You can already view images by face and drawing type, so this is probably just another extension of this. I just hope they refine the image recognition before putting it live.
Philip Norton Lead Developer, Research and Development
A neat little addition that allows users to filter Google image searches by colour has been announced on the Google Operating System Blog.
To enable this you just need to add the parameter imgcolor to the URL and give it a colour as an option. There are currently 12 colours available, which are black, blue, brown, grey, green, orange, pink, purple, red, teal, white and yellow. So to search for red things just put this at the end of your Google image search URL. Read the rest of this entry »
Philip Norton Lead Developer, Research and Development
Google have been rolling out changes to the way in which search results are displayed. On many searches they are questioning ambiguous searches with a did you mean:. While this is often helpful for those with poor speeling, such as myself, it has created a stir amongst the SEO community who find that their carefully honed methods for ranking are pushed further down the listings. The did you mean tries to second-guess the user by adding results for the alternative query on top of the original search query. At present, it only seems to work when using google.com results.
However, as can be seen the additional search results take up two places. This is in addition to universal search which may add additional search results to the mix. The loss in traffic that can be considerable. In the event that the did you mean search was correct then the top two results are are going to get all the hits for mis-spellings. This will provide additional traffic for these top two results making them even more important. If the did you mean answer was wrong, it shouldn’t effect the result too much because the first two results are irrelevant. If you were type the query correctly, the results appear as normal.
Sir Pumpkin Longshanks Programmer, Research and Development
