The New Google Image Swirl

Google Image Swirl is the company’s latest addition to its search engine. However, at the moment this is only available on a trial basis, but having played around with it for a while you may agree this is a great take on the current Google Image Search.

The current Image Search is one of the most popular aspects of Google with many people performing images searches on a daily basis, and over the years it has become increasingly more advanced with the ability to recognise similar images to the one you are looking at.

Image Swirl is based on Google’s existing Wonder Wheel and so, when using this and doing a search the results look similar to the thumbnails presented in regular image search results. You will notice however that there are many images stacked behind the top-most result.

Once you click on the first thumbnail the stack expands and shows you a cluster of images, related by visual characteristics. Click on one of those and you’ll get a further expansion, this time based on textual or conceptual relationships.

At the moment Image Swirl currently only works for about 200,000 of the most popular queries, while it is still on trial, but I highly recommend it having taken a look at this myself. Hopefully Google will release this feature in full in the not too distant future.

Kenneth Berkley
Natural SEO Programmer