Case Study — Google Image Search

I wrote an article about Google Image Search on July 16, 2011. The next day I intended to publish about Mount Lokon Volcano Eruption in my weekend image post.

It’s very important for any blogger to publish correct facts and figures, right images, and not to violate anyone’s copyright. So it’s imperative to do some homework before publishing an article.

In my image blog post I wanted to publish about 10 images of recent Mount Lokon eruption, mentioning the source of the images.

First I made a Google image search (clicking on the camera icon) with text – Volcano erupts in central Indonesia. And there were about 261,000 results.

Now the problem is there were too many search results, obviously most of them were not of Mount Lokon, and even if, many were not related to recent events.

So I wanted to do a Drag and Drop image search.

I was sure that the second image is of Mount Lokon, and the image was only 6 days old. So I dragged it and dropped it in the search by image box:

And the result was on expected lines – search results dropped to only 501. If I would have chosen Past Week for image search, the result would have narrowed down further.

Now, it was easier for me to browse through a couple of news articles for correct facts, and gather about 10 images with source credits for my weekend article.

Google also displays Visually similar images at the bottom of the page. Here I was disappointed with the suggestions as you could see for yourself in the screen grab below:

But on the whole I have found Google Image Search very useful.