Google Images
Take a break from text-crawling and check out Google Images (http://images.google.com/), an index of over 390 million images available on the Web. While sorely lacking in special syntaxes [Section 1.5], the Advanced Image Search (http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search) does offer some interesting options.
Tip
Of course, any options on the Advanced Image Search page can be expressed via a little URL hacking [Hack #9].
Googleâs image search starts with a plain keyword
search. Images are indexed under a variety of keywords, some broader
than others; be as specific as possible. If youâre
searching for cats, donât use cat
as a keyword unless you donât mind getting results
that include âcat scan.â Use words
that are more uniquely cat-related, like feline
or
kitten
. Narrow down your query as much as
possible, using as few words as possible. A query like
feline
fang
, which would get
you over 3,000 results on Google, will get you no results on Google
Image Search; in this case, cat
fang
works better. (Building queries for image
searching takes a lot of patience and experimentation.)
Search results include a thumbnail, name, size (both pixels and kilobytes), and the URL where the picture is to be found. Clicking the picture will present a framed page, Googleâs thumbnail of the image at the top, and the page where the image originally appeared at the bottom. Figure 2-2 shows a Google Images page.
Figure 2-2. A Google Images page
Searching Google Images can ...
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