I happened across a wonderful surprise tonight as I went to fetch something using Google’s Image Search. Right there on the front page, sat an invitation to Explore images using Google Image Swirl.

Almost Ready

Google talked about this back in mid-november and even had a rocky preview available for users to try out. Afterwards it was quietly forgotten about by most, and just recently people have begun to see it linked from the front page of Google Image Search.

Clicking the link on the starter page takes you into Swirl, which then nudges you into searching for something. It has a pre-selected list of queries that they use to showcase the technology, such as Andy Warhol, but you can choose your own.

Easy on the Eyes

It’s nice, and by nice I mean it’s amazing. Everyone had mixed feelings when Bing popped up with its Silverlight-powered Visual Search (my feelings weren’t mixed at all — I think it’s garbage), but this offering from Google is just as pure and inviolate as the rest of their stable of search-related tools. You don’t need an obnoxious and unwanted plug-in to use it.

On first glance, it appears to basically to group similar images together into families of distinguishable likeness, and then array them for the user to choose what type of image they’re looking for to best suit their query. Say, for instance, that you searched for Jaguar. Oldschool Image Search wouldn’t know if you meant the big cat, or the overpriced car, and it would show a jumbled mess of both depending on which had hired better SEO consultants. Swirl seems to leverage the same data, while mixing it with pixel-data to allow it to divide the pictures so that like mingles with like. This lets the user choose right off the bat whether they meant to look for cats, or cars.

Try Swirl Now: http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/

Once you select a family of like images, you’re presented with an exploded grouping of those images, and a tree of any sub-groupings composed of variants that may interest you. Hovering the mouse over the main image of the family tree will show data like image size and source, along with an option to pop it out to its own window.

It’s a little rough around the edges at the moment, and doesn’t even work for all search terms yet (my default search term for engine tests is monkies, it didn’t even let me try), but it’s not bad considering it’s only just getting started. I’m quite eager to see how it shapes up in the weeks to come.