Google Image Ripper is a nifty little Google hack that lets you search for Google Images without surfing through an endless sea of thumbnails.

All you have to do is enter a search term, an image size (icon, small, medium, large, xlarge, or xxlarge), and hit the rip button. The program searches for images that meet your specifications, and loads all the images onto one screen.

Of course, if you're looking for Creative Commons photos that you can reuse, you're still better off searching Flickr. But if you just need to see a ton of pictures of Angelina Jolie or Jeff Raikes, this might be the tool for you.

[via Boing Boing]

Google has gone and added three major updates to Picasa Web Albums. First, any photos you upload to a blog using Blogger will automatically be added to your personal web album. This sort of integration makes a lot of sense, making it much easier to search for and find photos you've previously used on your blog. Of course, Google could have just included an image search feature in the "search this blog" box on blogger.

The other announcements are probably much bigger news for anyone who doesn't use Blogger. The storage capacity for web albums has been bumped up to 1GB. And while yesterday, you could only search for images in your own web album. Today, you can do a "community search," allowing you to search for images across all web albums. It'll be interesting to see if Google eventually ads these images to Google Images search results.

If you'd rather not share your photos with the whole world, you can set your web albums to "unlisted." Not might be a good time to go do that if you weren't aware that your baby photos were suddenly going to be made available to the whole world. Might have been nice if Google had sent out an email to give users a heads up.

Does this mean Google's trying to take on Flickr? It's too early to say. On the one hand, you can easily search for images and view users shared galleries. On the other hand, Picasa Web Albums don't allow users to assign Creative Commons licenses to their images. That means if you're looking for images you can use and/or edit, you're still probably better off searching Flickr.

A few weeks ago Google went and changed its design for Google images by cleaning up all that annoying extra data on the screen that you don't need, like the image size and the website where it's located. You could still see that information, but only by scrolling your mouse over the image.

Generally, this made Google Images much less useful. If there are multiple versions of the same image available, it's nice to know which one is the largest at a glance, for example. Or if you're looking for images of a rock band, you might want to know which ones come from the band's official web site.

Now, less than a month after rolling out its site redesign, it looks like Google's reverted back to the older, more informative version of Google images. It's nice to see Google reacting to negative response from users, if in fact that's what they're doing. It's always possible this is just a glitch, or that a new interface could be on its way next week.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

My friend Ty pointed out to me today that Google has changed the interface of Google Images, and not necessarily for the better. While the old results display for Google Images searches showed a thumbnail of each image along with the host's domain name, the image's dimensions, and a short description (taken from the image's context on the site). Now Google Images only shows the short description unless you move your mouse over one of the thumbnails. For me, this makes the service significantly less intuitive. If I'm looking for, say, a logo that's a certain size, I want to be able to see each image's dimensions at a glance, but with the new interface I have to roll my mouse over each and every one until I find one that's the right size. Similarly, being able to see the hosts of all of the images was handy, especially if you noticed that many of them are served by the same host. But now it's like a puzzle, moving your mouse around until you find what you're looking for.

I'm not sure if this new interface is showing up for all users, as Google is in the habit of testing new interfaces on a small cross section of users, but either way I hope this is an interface change they reconsider. What do you think of the update?

We've been peripherally interested in Riya, an image recognition slash visual search start-up since we first caught wind of it, but now they've really got our attention. Riya is now testing Like.com, which is basically a shopping search engine with a visual seach twist. "Basically" is a poor way to put it, however, because though the experience isn't exactly jaw-dropping, if you spend some time playing around with it, you can see the potential. Like.com is truly the first of its kind: there's no keywords here, just pure pixels. In its current alpha incarnation, Like.com allows you to browse the products in its catalog--shoes, handbags, jewelry, and watches--visually, meaning you can find an item you like and then find other items that look like it. If you like a certain aspect of an item--the toe on a shoe or the face on a watch, for example--you can highlight just that area and it will find items with similar features. You can also choose which aspects of your search are most important: color, shape, and pattern. While currently you can only search using images already in Like.com's library, Riya plans to add image upload features that, if the Like.com front page is any indication, will allow you to do thinks like upload a photo of a celebrity, highlight his wristwatch, and find it and similar watches around the web.

Like I said, Like.com isn't going to change online shopping today, but the groundwork is definitely there, and it does an impressive job of proving that Riya's image search technology really does work.

P.S. How long before Riya gets into the internet dating business? "Find men in your area that look like Brad Pitt..."

[Via TechCrunch]