Google improves “search by image”, now includes Knowledge Graph in results

When you’re using Google for search, one of the cooler features is dragging or uploading an image into the search box and letting the company’s computer vision technology find results based on matches.

The company has shared some interesting details as to how it’s making the search by image experience more useful as you’re trying to find more information about what you’re looking for.

Here’s what Google Software Engineer Sean O’Malley had to say about this today:

Finding more information about an image is the most common use of Search by Image. Very often this information is found on websites that contain either your image or images that look like it. We’ve made recent improvements to our freshness, so when photos of major news stories start appearing on the Internet, you can often find the news stories associated with those photos within minutes of the stories being posted. We’ve also expanded our index so you can find more sites that contain your image and information related to it.

In addition to some tweaks and improvements, including its “best guess” on what you’re looking for, Google is now using Knowledge Graph in image search results as well.

For example, I uploaded a photo of pop star Prince, and Google was able to figure out who it was and showed me the Knowledge Graph card on the right hand side, which includes information about him:

These enhanced search results only come up when you’re doing a search by image, meaning you’ve uploaded a photo for Google to match. Unfortunately, this meta data doesn’t show when you do a regular text search for an image.

➤ Google Image Search