Image search is a fascinating subject and something that can drive a substantial amount of traffic to your website. For the past few months I’ve been using a Netvibes widget that allows you to compare image search results in a nice AJAX interface.
How they compare for iPhone
Lets see how the 4 compare for the iPhone image search:
Google is the clear winner here. Flickr seems to be showing photos taken with an iPhone. Yahoo and Ask are way out of date.
Matt Cutts
Google and Yahoo are joint winners here. Ask has good results but appears to be distorting some of the images.
Paris
The key with a search term like “paris” is to offer a variety of results. Some people might be looking for Paris Hilton, some may want images of Paris and some might want a map. This is where personalised search results would be useful.
The winners here are Ask and Google.
Blue Buy Now Button
Google results here are totally unrelated, Yahoo gets the colour almost right but the Ask results are amazing. Flickr had no results.
Red Buy Now Button
Google has the colour right on this one, Yahoo does well with the first result but Ask is the winner again.
Conclusions
Image search engines are clearly very advanced. I was amazed at how well Ask handled the button search queries and will be using them in future to find web design graphics. Personalised results would improve the search results no end by removing Paris Hilton for people who had just been searching for flights to Paris for example.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Ask.com produced good results for those buttons but for normal search Google presents better results. And why was there no image from Flickr for the last two queries? But anyway good analysis.
Flickr returned zero results for the last 2 queries so I didn’t mention them.
Oh I thought Flickr would have god some weird results for the last two also. Stumbled! this good analysis.
If I recall correctly, users typically don’t like getting tiny button/navigational images, so I think Google might do some extra work to exclude things like buttons that a lot of users consider less helpful. I’d guess that’s probably the reason for the last couple of queries.
It was fun that you picked me as an example query.
Google is always the king of search, may it be images or any other thing.
Recently anytime I’ve needed to search for pictures I’ve been used live image search. The results are almost always better, and their interface is very intuitive. I might checkout ask image search next time I’m looking.
Why didn’t you compare Live.com’s image search? I think they may have the best.
Leave a Comment (registration is optional)