» Google recognizes faces

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Google recognizes faces

Google Image Search is now able to identify faces in pictures.

By Pandia Guest Writer Lars Iselid, Internetbrus

Google has made a silent launch of a new face search function in Google Image Search .

If you search for a person — let’s say Henrik Larsson — and then add the following text string to the end of the URL: &imgtype=face , Google will only include faces in image search results.

In this case Google will, unfortunately, not only give us pictures of the Swedish soccer player Henrik Larsson.

It would be great if Google could take this function one step further and sort pictures of people with similar names into different clusters. In this way a search for James Dean would sort the results for the actor James Dean and the singer James Dean Bradfield into different lists of search results.

You may exchange the term face in the search string URL with news in order to generate news related pictures only.

These new functions are probably the result of Google buying Neven Vision in the fall of 2006.

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.

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