Google’s image recognition technology now live!

In April Google added an innovative new feature to its Image Search call ‘Similar Images’.  The new feature was launched within Google Labs, the place where the company tests its new and experimental products and features.

Today after 6 long months of testing ‘Similar Images’ has become a standard feature within Google Image Search.  If you haven’t used this fantastic new feature, here’s a recap of what it can do.

Similar Images uses Google’s Image recognition technology.  This technology has previously been implemented in Google Image Colour Search, which allows you to narrow down image searches based on a specified colour.  ’Similar Images’ takes this technology to a whole new level.  For example if you are a bit of a petrol head and run an image search for the term ‘Mini Cooper’.  You can then narrow down your results further by identifying a particular image and then clicking the ‘similar images’ link.  If you have picked an image of a Blue Mini Cooper it will return more results of Blue Mini Coopers.  Every time I run an image search I am amazed how accurate the results are.  The feature has saved me countless hours searching for images.  In the past I have entered additional search terms to narrow down my search results, however this has often excluded many useful results.  Google ‘Similar Images’ Search now eliminates the need for me to do this.

The screenshot below shows a selection of the images returned from the search term: “mini cooper”:

The next screenshot shows the related image results returned by clicking on the ‘Find similar images’ link below the first image:

I am sure following its debut as a standard feature within Google Image Search we will now see many more people utilising this highly valuable new search feature in the coming weeks and months.