Google is trialling an interesting new take on Image Search – Image Swirl.
Image Search is a hugely popular part of how people use Google and it’s become increasingly advanced in recent years. The ability to recognise similar images to the one you’re looking at is particularly useful.
Image Swirl, a new product from Google Labs, takes that and makes it all a whole lot easier to use. It’s based on Google’s existing Wonder Wheel search tool but because it uses images it’s much sexier to look at.
Enter a search term and a grid of twelve matching images in displayed. If you on any of those it flies out from the grid and a bunch of similar images to that one spawn off it like a spider diagram. Click on one of the new images and the same will happen again.
While it doesn’t change much about the actual results you get from a search, it’s far more click and natural to cick through a series of images than it is to tweak ‘advanced search’ options to find the best result.
As it’s still a test product not all search terms currently work with it (“The Next Web” is missing!), but you can try it now at http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/
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