Limit Search Results to Faces or News with Google Image Search

Google’s acquisition of face recognition technology from Neven Vision is finally implemented on Google Images (unofficially). You’ll be able to restrict image search results to just face or news with decent accuracy.

Since it is unofficial, there is no straight cut way to include the restriction, you’ll have to add any one of the following parameters at the end of the image search URL (ignore the text inside square brackets):

  • imgtype=face [for faces]
  • imgtype=news [for news]

For example, searching for “Dell” will show up Dell computers and their logo, whereas if you add “imgtype=face” at the end of the existing URL, you’ll just find Michael Dell along with other people (no logos, no computers) and the results incredibly accurate. I could just spot one non-face result out of 18 results (94.4% accuracy for “Dell“).The below screenshot compares both set of results:

Google_images_face 

Now that the feature fully functional, I think it won’t take long before Google officially implements this feature inside Google Image Search. Impressive again!

Via Google Blogoscoped

This post was published by on May 30, 2007

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://sizzledcore.uni.cc/blog/ Haris

    I’ll definitely give this a try!

    Thanks for sharing Thilak.

  • http://www.technospot.net/blogs/spawners-see-what-others-are-writing/ Spawners : See what others are writing

    [...] Thilak writes on How to limit search results to faces or news with google image search [...]

  • http://www.technospot.net/blogs/ Ashish Mohta

    Visual Search engines are the future. Good finding

  • http://www.freakitude.com Lovedeep Wadhwa

    Try this Greasemonkey Script to add image type selections to Google Image search.

  • http://blog.shankarganesh.com Shankar Ganesh

    This technology has to evolve

  • http://lagopi.blogspot.com Ramanathan

    Excellent find. Image results are pretty accurate.