Google’s search engine registers tens of billions of queries every month and a significant part of those queries are image searches. On Wednesday, Google announced that image search results on mobile in USA will also include information from the knowledge graph.
The knowledge graph data will include people, places or things related to the image, and is aimed to help people to explore a particular topic easily,
Currently, the additional knowledge graph data will only appear on some image searches of people, places and things and Google plans to expand it to more images, languages and devices over time.
Talking about how Google matches images to the relevant knowledge graph database, Angela Wu, Software Engineer, Search, wrote in the announcement, “To generate these links to relevant Knowledge Graph entities, we take what we understand about the image through deep learning, which evaluates an image’s visual and text signals and combine it with Google’s understanding of the text on the image’s web page. This information helps us determine the most likely people, places or things relevant to a specific image. We match this with existing topics in the Knowledge Graph, and then surface them in Google Images when we’re confident we’ve found a match.”
Alongwith the rest of Google search’s UI, the image search has also transitioned and included more data alongwith the photos that appeared in the search results. In an update last year, Google images also got a refreshed image preview panel that appeared on the side of the screen, among other updates.
So when users click on an image from the search results on Google Images, the selected image will appear in the side panel and the other images will still be visible on one side of the page. The preview stays there even when a user scrolls down the results page until it’s closed manually or the user selects another image for preview.
While the update was received with mixed reactions, the addition of knowledge graph database to Google Image search results should come as a welcome addition.
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