Aug 23, 2010 10:21 GMT  ·  By

Google has finally introduced a feature that was sorely needed for its Image Search engine. Search results now feature a link to "more sizes" which lists the same image in various sizes found on the web.

Many, many times images are available in several places around the web. However, while the source image is the same, they aren't exact copies. People and websites resize or crop the images for the best fit, or save them in different formats and at different quality settings.

This means that the first result for a particular image may not actually be the best copy around, just the one on the most relevant website, according to Google's ranking algorithm.

If you're interested in the site that houses the image and want to see it in context, this approach is the best. But if you just want the best possible image and you didn't care where it came from, there wasn't that much you could do until now.

You could restrict the search to just large or medium sized images, which culled the small copies, but this still involved too much effort from the user. The new 'infinite scroll' interface introduced with the Image Search revamp also helped, making it easier to skim through the images.

You could also try to search for the image by its file name, but this rarely provided better results since many websites automatically rename images attached to posts.

With "More sizes," Google does all of the work for you. Using image recognition algorithms the search engine matches images that share the same source, even if they come in different sizes or have been edited differently. It may even list images with different sources that are still very similar.

Of course, Google Image search results already had the 'similar images' feature, but "More sizes" is different since it looks for images which duplicates not just similar.

TinEye was one option for those looking for a particular image, but it doesn't prove very reliable in practice, its index is just too small. Bing Image Search also has the option to see different sizes of the same image which works very much the same as the Google implementation. [via Google OS]

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More sizes in Google Image Search
More sizes in Bing Image Search
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