• Google Blogoscoped, Monday, November 12, 2007 2:15 PM

Google now offers users suggestions for refining their image search queries, with the "also try" feature that is common to text search. With a search for "Jackson" for example, Google suggests narrowing the results down by trying "Andrew Jackson," or "Jackson guitars."

The feature does not come up with every query, as a search for 'granola' just turned up more than 10 pages of results. At this time there's nothing but speculation over how Google chooses which queries trigger the related searches. Blogger Philipp Lenssen poses that the search giant's algorithm checks to see if the keywords used are often paired with other words (either on the first try or after a user gets too many results) and makes suggestions accordingly.

Yahoo launched this related search feature for images in 2005, and both Ask.com and MSN's Live Search have refinements or suggestions for image searches. The prominence and propensity of these features varies with each engine (Ask always shows related searches in the left panel, while Live Search typically only does it for public figures like celebrities or politicians); but it's clear that the major search providers think that users need more assistance with image search than a text-based query.

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