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How to Use Google Images to Identify Unfamiliar and Foreign Words
Have you ever asked someone to tell you what a certain word meant, only to be as clueless as you were before you heard their explanation? Google Images can help.
When I was in high school, I was trying to describe an armoire to one of my friends. She didn’t really understand the concept of a closet that wasn’t built into a wall. If only Google Images had existed ten years ago! All you have to do is type in the word that you aren’t sure about at the Google Images Homepage (opens in new window). Below, I typed in the word armoire.
From these photos, you can clearly tell what an armoire is. Perhaps my friend would have instantly realized what an armoire is if I could have used Google Images back then…
There are a variety of uses for this tool. For example, let’s suppose you get invited over to your new neighbor’s house for dinner and they tell you that you will be eating artichokes. If you’ve never heard of that vegetable, you can quickly get a view of it on Google Images.
Sounds like a tasty dinner!
Searching for Foreign Words
You can also find a variety of foreign words. Let’s say you are fluent in Spanish and are trying to decipher something written in Portuguese, a language very similar to Spanish. Everything is going fine and then you stumble upon the word abacaxi. All you have to do is type it into a Google Images search box, and voila:
You can be fairly certain that abacaxi means pineapple. A pretty far stretch from the spanish word piña that you are used to!
If you have any questions or comments about using Google Images to find words that you are unfamiliar with, please leave your comments below.
How to Use Google Image Search to Find Images of Faces
A little known fact about Google Image search is that it literally has the capability to recognize when an image is of a person’s face or not. Although not 100% perfect, it works surprisingly well.
How Do You Use it?
All you have to do is add &imgtype=face to the end of the URL in the address bar of your web browser after performing a Google Image Search.
For example, if you perform a Google Image Search for the keyword robin, you will get the following results:
These results aren’t very helpful if you are looking for a person named Robin. You would have to scroll through dozens of search results before finding what you are looking for.
However, if you go up to the address bar and append &imgtype=face to the end of the web address, and hit enter, you will get noticeably different results:
Clarification
In case you are wondering, the web address that displayed the first set of results where we saw mostly birds was: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=robin&gbv=2 (link opens in new window).
The URL that got us the faces, as shown in the second set of search results was: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=robin&gbv=2&imgtype=face (link opens in new window).
Google Images: How to Use Google to Find Images
Google is a professional when it comes to indexing the text of web pages and returning highly relevant results. Google was also one of the first search engines to index images.
Indexing images is a whole different ballgame. Any computer can index words in a web page and find out what it is about based on the amounts of different words. However, a computer can’t simply look at an image and tell you what it is - it contains no words. Therefore, Google has to do a little detective work to find out what keywords describe an image best.
To learn more about the ways that Google finds out what is in an image, you can check out an earlier article about having fun playing with the Google Image Labeler.
How to Find Images
If you’ve performed a lot of searches, you may have noticed that sometimes Google automatically shows you some image results when you are performing a simple web search. Since it is the 4th of July, let’s search for something patriotic - The American Flag. If you do a search on the keywords american flag, Google will bring up a page of search results that has three American flag images at the top.
You can easily click on the blue link right above the images of the flags to view all of the image results for the American Flag. You will see a page similar to the one below.
However, what happens if you perform a normal search on a keyword and Google doesn’t show you images? How would you go about finding images?
If you are serious about finding images with Google, you should simply perform an image search rather than a basic web search hoping that images appear in your results. To do this, simply go to the Google homepage and click on the Images link at the top of the screen to the right of Web. You will also notice links to many of Google’s other searches that you can perform such as Maps, News, and Shopping.
The image below shows you exactly where to click:
After clicking, you will be greeted by the standard Google Images search page, which looks like this:
In the search box, I will type the keyword fireworks. This should return a variety of images that contain fireworks. After pressing Search Images, I see the following page:
Suppose you wanted to use one of these images for a large poster you are making to publicize your backyard fireworks presentation and you want a large image that has lots of detail. You can easily tell Google to only show you very large images. To do this, look in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and find the drop down box right after the words Images Showing:.
You can then select the image size that you prefer. In this case we will select Extra Large images so that it won’t look grainy when we enlarge it on our poster.
You can see from the above picture that Google is only showing us extra large images. Now, you are a pro at using Google to find images.
By the way, it is important to understand that many of the images that Google returns are subject to copyright and before using them it is wise to obtain the copyright holder’s permission.
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