One of our favorites among the search engines is the leading European search engine Exalead. Exalead has recently updated its image search engine with several major improvements.

By Panda Guest Writer Lars Våge, Internetbrus

Exalead’s interface has become much better and could now be the most ingenious of all of the big image search services online.

The results are now presented just as thumbnails with information on the original image resolution beneath.

If you let your cursor hover above the images, Exalead will show some very relevant links. You may, for instance, save the image with one click. Such an operation will require three or more click when using Google or one of the others.

You can go directly to the original size version of the image (as opposed to clicking two times with the other search engines). Moreover, you may go directly to the web page containing the original image without getting it framed as in Google and Yahoo!.

Another great feature is that Exalead shows you the various options for filtering if you set the cursor in the search field. You may there select filters for size, orientation, color vs. gray scale, file types and content.

As regards the content filter, Exalead may sort out images containing faces only. Microsoft’s Live Search also lets you select “face” or “head and shoulders”.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that Google, Yahoo! and Live Search return far more image hits, I would say that Exalead has the best image search engine around right now.

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. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

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