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How to search Google’s images with color

March 25th, 2009 by SteD

Here’s some interesting stuff I’ve come across these few days! The Poignant Guide to Ruby is highly recommended. P/S: Ruby is a programming language.

Oh, today I just discovered that Google allows color search.
For example, you search for Fire. Your query looks like this
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=fire

but but..I want much hotter fire I said, I want blue fire!
So you add a imgcolor=blue to the query.
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=fire&imgcolor=blue

And there you got your blue fire.
You could also combine colors search with comma.
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=fire&imgcolor=blue,pink

Alternatively, you can just query for blue fire :P
Anyway, my point is I discovered Google could do that today!

Ok, I find the fire option a bit lame. Let’s have another more pratical example. Say I wanted to search for a laptop with erm..pink color, rather than browsing through a whole 10 pages of search results, I specify pink color and I get what I want, I’m happy, Google is happy.

P/S: If you’re curious and interested in how Google’s image color recolonization algorithm work, visit this paper(pdf) published by Google engineers Henry Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, and Dr. Yushi Jing.

I Read, yada yada

Poignant Guide to Ruby – The most interesting programming book I’ve read
Dell’s iPhone Killer rejected by carriers as too dull – poor Dell…lol

“Visual Design Lead” leaves Google – There goes another talented people from Google
Facebook bug reveals private photos – Think twice for your putting everything online

4 Responses

  1. boo

    what difference does it make, if i just type Blue Fire in the search box?

  2. SteD

    That’s why I said the fire example is lame. I guess it’s good at times if you really want to search for something in a particular color.

  3. steve

    cool, even the advanced google image search page doesnt have this option yet

  4. torrent

    BLUE bird will be a good example.

    i think this function only apply for image searching, so you can go to this link: http://images.google.com/ and search for the color object you look for.

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