Google announced today a new feature which will allow users to search the internet using images found both on their computer or online.
‘Search By Image‘ simply requires an image to be dragged and dropped into the search bar, returning similar or related images, search results and the image source –all with varying sizes and resolutions. Chrome and Firefox extensions offer faster search time by allowing the user to simply right click on any image online and ‘search Google with this image’. Images can also be uploaded to images.google.com using the camera icon and selecting your image from your computer. Image URL’s are also searchable by pasting the image URL into the image search page.
The new feature is designed to work best with images that contain well-known content such as popular places, works of art, celebrities and nature.
How it works;
Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate “best guess” text description of your image, as well as find other images that have the same content as your search image. Your search results page can show results for that text description as well as related images.