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| PC Today: CD & DVD Drives, Palm & Windows CE Software, Online Photography | |
| May 2001• Vol.9 Issue 5 Page(s) 109-110 in print issue | |
Specialty Photo-Related Search Engines Picture Yourself Finding Just The Right Image |
Jump to first occurrence of:
[PHOTO]
[SEARCH]
[ENGINES]
[RICH]
[GRAY]
 The Internet is so full of
information that it’s a wonder anyone finds what they’re looking for
online. Search engines help make this task easier, and to
simplify things even more, certain search engines are dedicated to a
specific topic, helping you cut through the clutter and find what you
need. Many (but not all) of these specialty search engines are tied in
with some of the Internet’s biggest portal sites, such as AltaVista,
Excite, and Lycos. Each engine works a little differently than the others,
offering unique features that distinguish it from its peers. Many specialty search engines offer a filtering system for straining out a lot of the adult content that searching for an image can get you. Others let you search through special collections with which the search engine has an alliance or specify different types of multimedia to search for. In some cases this is fine-tuned to the point where you can specifically search for color or black-and-white photos or require that all pictures in the search results have people in them. One thing to keep in mind: These engines pull in images from a wide range of sources, including personal pages on the Web, collections such as Getty Images and Reuters, and even images that registered users to the service have uploaded. Make sure you click through to an image’s copyright information before attempting to use it. AltaVista Image Search This site is the image search section of the AltaVista portal site. Here you can narrow your searches to include any or all of the following: photos, graphics, buttons/banners, and color or black-and-white images. The AltaVista Image Search lets you either search for images on the Web or tap into some of its partner sites such as Corbis, Getty Images, and RollingStone. AltaVista also features a more advanced version of its engine that lets you fine-tune your searches with a Boolean query. In both basic and advanced versions, you can search by either entering keywords or a question or phrase the search box. The AltaVista Image Search site has a family filter feature that you can turn on or off by clicking the text link above the search box. Parents can set the filter for only multimedia content, all content, or no content and password protect it for further peace of mind. The results page features thumbnail images that give you an easy way to view matches, and you can get specific information on each image by clicking the More Info link under each image (or go right to the page that the image appears on by clicking it). Finally, clicking the Similar link that appears under some thumbnail images will return similar images. http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&stype=simage
Ditto.com is one of the few image search engines we’ve included here that isn’t tied into a major portal site, but that doesn’t keep it from doing a great job of finding photos on the Web. In fact, Ditto.com offers many of the same features as its better-known peers. Visitors to Ditto.com can use it to search the Web or target specific image collections such as Getty Images and Reuters. The main search page even gives you a list of popular and weekly featured searches, so you can see what others are searching for. Ditto.com also incorporates an always-on filtering system that weeds out adult and other content that is inappropriate for children. Before clicking the Search to find an image, make sure you designate what collection Ditto.com will search, as well as how it will display the items it finds (as a list or as thumbnail images, with nine, 12, or 15 images per page). Special features include a MyDitto section, where you can personalize the engine, and the Ditto Detective, which you can put to work finding images. http://www.ditto.com/
Excite’s Precision Search page lets you narrow searches to seek out Web sites, news, products, photos, and MP3/audio files. The results page has most of the options for customizing your search. For example, here you can choose to search through two primary indexes: member photos and news photos. Member photos, which the engine defaults to when searching, returns matches from Excite’s user-posted images, a 4 million-strong collection of “free” photos. To search for news photos, click the News Photos link at the top of the results page. This index contains more than 30,000 of the latest news photos from Reuters and the Associated Press. The results page also lets you turn the adult filter on or off. Click the See Image Options link under each thumbnail image in the results to get information and a number of options, such as sending the image as an eCard or downloading it for your use. Here you can also zoom in or out on an image; just click the resize box and select a size between Smallest and Largest. http://www.excite.com/search_forms/photosearch Lycos Multimedia Tied to the Lycos portal site, Lycos Multimedia lets you search not only for pictures but also for audio and video files. You can choose what type of files to look for from the radio buttons atop the search box. After a search, the results page will give you a series of thumbnail images the engine found in the Lycos Web catalog. Click an image you like to enlarge it. This will also let you look at copyright information, the picture’s caption, and more. Further down the results page, a sample of audio and video files that fit your query are displayed. Lycos Multimedia has one of the most configurable parental controls of the engines we looked at. Click the Parental Controls link next to the search box (the link will say whether the controls are on or off) to access the SearchGuard tool that lets you select what content, including hate/racist content, violence, weapons, and sexually-oriented materials, to filter out. Here you can also block out certain aspects of Lycos’ service, such as chat and e-mail. http://multimedia.lycos.com/ Visoo The Visoo image search engine is a very minimal site; you won’t be bombarded by unnecessary clutter here. Despite its minimal décor, Visoo offers a number of features that are standard for many image search engines, such as a family filter you can turn on or off. What makes Visoo interesting, though, are the fairly unique features it offers. For example, you can choose whether the images Visoo returns should have people in them. Our favorite is the OCR (optical character recognition) feature; which really sets it apart from other image engines. This feature lets you search for words in an image. For example, this feature could find the name of a town on a map. Besides searching with OCR, you can choose Filename or OCR + Filename. Selecting Filename will return results that have your keyword as part of the image’s filename. The OCR + Filename option will return results that have the keyword in the filename and the image. Finally, the results page shows thumbnail images and information about the size of each image. Also under each image is a link to the page the image resides on. http://www.visoo.com/ WebSEEk Columbia University’s WebSEEk is one of the few image search engines we looked at that also makes use of a comprehensive subjects index, so you can find images grouped in such categories as Cats and Horror. To check out all the categories (and the number of images in each), click the Browse link at the top of the page. WebSEEk also offers a search engine for finding photos and videos from the 665,000 files it has catalogued so far. Select the specific type of multimedia file you want by choosing the appropriate radio button (All, Videos, Color Photos, Gray Images, or graphics). The results page tells you what subjects and items meet your query specifications; clicking one of the results links to see thumbnail images. http://disney.ctr.columbia.edu/WebSEEk Yahoo! Picture Gallery There are several ways to find just the right image at the Yahoo! Picture Gallery. You can search for a picture using the standard search box or browse the Featured Pictures section. Alternately, try the Picture Categories section, which, like WebSEEk, organizes images into categories. Some category examples include Arts & Architecture, People & Relationships, and Leisure & Recreation. The Picture Gallery contains over 400,000 pictures from sources such as Corbis. What you can do with a picture will vary from image to image. You can freely use many pictures with Yahoo! Services such as greeting cards or PageBuilder (a features of Yahoo! GeoCities). Other images you can download or purchase as prints or screensavers. You really have to click through on individual images (click the image) to get information about the image and an idea of what you can do with it. A number of links located on the individual image page will let you know every possible action you can take with it. http://gallery.yahoo.com/ Happy searching!  by Rich Gray
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