Google's image search is one of the fastest ways to find a picture of just about anything, but that doesn't mean you can use all of the images you find on your website or blog. We've shied away from finding images for Download Squad on Google Image Search in the past, because it's hard to find and credit the creator of the image and be sure you have permission to use it. Google just made it a lot easier, though, by adding the option to search for Creative Commons-licensed images.

The terms of Creative Common licenses vary, but if you go to "advanced image search," you can choose to filter images by the reuse and modification privileges their licenses allow. If you search for Creative Commons images, Google will also throw in other images that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation license or in the public domain. Google says it's still a user's responsibility to click through and verify that the licensing information is actually correct, but that's still a lot easier than sifting through thousands of image results yourself, looking for one you can use.

TinEye is an image search engine. But unlike other image search tools such as Google Images, you don't search for pictures with text queries. Instead you upload a picture or post a URL for one that's already online and TinEye will find similar images on other web sites.

The service launched a beta last year, but you needed to sign up for an account and login every time you wanted to search. TinEye is still in beta, but last month the company removed the login requirement, which means anyone can use TinEye. No username or password necessary.

You can still register for an account which will get you access to new features ahead of other users.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Ginipic is a desktop utility for Windows that lets you search for images from Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo! Images, SmugMug, deviantArt, Live Search, Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook, and Fotolia. You can search for pictures from a single source, a list of favorites, or all source at once.

You can also use Ginipic to search for photos on your desktop. By default it will search your My Pictures folder in the My Documents area, but you can choose any directory to search. When you click on an image in the search results a preview window shows up to show the image. From this window you can email the image, copy it, set it as your Windows desktop background, save the image, or mark it as a favorite. You can also see it in the original context, which means Ginipic will open the web page or desktop folder where the image was originally found.

Ginipic can be docked to the side of your display or you can minimize the application or set it to float like any other Windows program. You can also maximize the program to view a wall of images.

[via Go2Web20]

You know that feeling you got the first time you realized you could search for images on the internet using Google Image Search? You know, the one that made you waste three hours of your day looking for pictures of yourself, your friends, that kid you went to school with that you always had a crush on but never worked up the courage to talk to. Yeah, well now you can look for them in clip art form.

Google has added a new search by style feature to its Image Search page. You can search for pictures from news items, pictures with faces, clip art, line drawings, or photos.

For some items, like "Apple" the results are impressive. If you click faces, you get pictures of Steve Jobs. If you click clip art or line drawings, you get cartoon-like images of apples. But some queries return funnier results. For example, a clip art search for "juice" returns plenty of drawings of juice boxes and glasses of juice. But when you click on the news content tab you find pictures of OJ Simpson, among other things.

When you're using a search engine to find what you're looking for, you're probably used to typing a query, looking at the results, and refining your query. Every now and again you might even click a button that says it will show you similar results. Now Microsoft has added a button with exactly that feature to the company's image search engine.

When you conduct a search using Live Search Images, you can hover your mouse over any image and click the "show similar images" button. To be honest, it's a bit tricky to tell exactly what this does. Because if you've searched for something like "stick" you're probably already looking at a window filled with pictures of sticks. If you click the similar images button, you'll wind up on another page with images filled with sticks. That said, when I said I wanted to see similar images to a stick bug, I did get another picture of an insect - and several pictures of deodorant, glue sticks, and stick figures.

If you're looking for a more advanced image comparison service, check out TinEye, a beta site that allows you to upload a picture and find images on the internet that are compositionally similar.

[via Google Operating System]

There are plenty of image search engines on the web. Enter a text based search term, and Google, MSN, or Yahoo! will spit out a series of pictures it thinks match that query. But TinEye takes a slightly different approach. This image search engine, currently in private beta, lets you upload an image from your desktop and search the web for identical or similar images. You can also use an online image as your starting point.

The concept is pretty cool. If you're looking for an image, why should you have to enter text? But the truth of the matter is it takes a bit longer to search for something using TinEye than a text based search engine. And it's a lot harder to get accurate results. If you upload a popular image that's been used on a bunch of web sites, you should be fine. But if you upload your hand-drawn image of Angelina Jolie naked, don't expect to find any high resolution images matching your query. Not that we tried.

But seriously, we uploaded a few images that have been posted here at Download Squad, and TinEye didn't spit out a single match, which means it doesn't even indext this site. So while the service claims to be searching a whopping 487 million images, it doesn't exactly cover every site on the web.

Still, we'll be keeping an eye on TinEye. If the service can improve its index and do a better job of finding similar images, and not just identical ones, it could actually become useful.

[via WebWare]

Quick, what do the twenty images above have in common? If you guessed they're all images pulled from Google Images, you guessed right. But that's not the answer we're looking for. The correct answer is Windows. And now you pretty much know how to play Guess the Google.

The game picks a random word, performs a Google Image search, and then gives you the results. You have 20 seconds to figure out the original search query. The faster you figure it out, the more points you get. The game is simple, but surprisingly addictive.

[via MakeUseOf]