• June 4, 2007

Reports of a new "facial recognition" capability embedded into Google's Image search were met with an official statement by a spokesperson.

"We're always working to improve the search user experience," the spokesperson said. "In the near future, we will be launching a new search feature that will enable users to refine their searches for images pertaining to faces and news articles."

Through a simple feature in the interface, users will be able to refine image searches to include only pictures of people (as opposed to logos, maps, and animations). Currently, this feature is only available to users with a bit of tech-savvy, as it requires adding the specific "&imgtype=face" parameter to the end of the results URL.

Analysts speculate that the imminent rollout of targeted image search capabilities may be the first product to arise from Google's acquisition of tech firm Neven Vision last year. Neven Vision's specialty was image object recognition.