Here are a few tips for finding what you want:

• Keep it short (but not too short). When you can be both brief and specific, you’re most likely to get what you want. For example, if you need a drawing of a male Muppet, a search for Bert turns up an overwhelming 40,000 results. A search for Bert Ernie gets you more than 900 pictures. And Bert Sesame Street weighs in at just over 200 images.

• Experiment and be patient. The keywords Google associates with images are not always consistent. Thus, while it’s generally a good idea to use very specific search terms, trying out variations can pay off, too—especially when your attempt to be brief and specific, as suggested above, doesn’t fly. For example, if vintage Cadillac convertible and 1953 El Dorado don’t pan out, try 1953 Cadillac convertible or
Cadillac El Dorado.

• Try the Advanced Image Search feature. Google’s Image Search has its own advanced search page, explained next, that’s separate from the advanced page for regular Web searches (page 48). It can help you narrow down a search by file type, size, or coloration (black and white, grayscale, or full color)—a choice that turns out to be particularly meaningful (see page 84 for more on why). And, as
explained in the box on the next page, Advanced Image Search lets you change the level of filtering Google uses for your results. Finally, the page guides you through keyword choices and lets you specify a site or domain Google should restrict your image search to.

• Use syntax. Google lets you use four syntax elements to focus your image searches. All four are the same ones used in Google’s regular Web search (page 60). Keep in mind that because image searches are something of a crapshoot, you’ll probably have to fiddle with these syntax elements till you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Intitle can be a good way to hone searches because it looks for your keywords in Web page titles, which removes some of the guesswork for Google about what a page contains. Use it like this: intitle:”taj mahal”.

Inurl works strangely in Google’s Image Search, because when Google records the text on a Web page, it considers certain elements—like JPG extensions—as part of the URL. Thus, if you search the image bank for inurl:poker, Google might show you a picture from the URL www.dogsplayingcards.com/velvet.html because that page contains a picture called poker.jpg. That weirdness aside, inurl is like intitle in that it can whittle your results from thousands or tens of thousands of images down to a manageable number, like a few hundred.

Filetype is available as a choice in the Advanced Image Search, too, although you can use it to search only for the formats Google keeps track of—JPG, GIF, and PNG. The one trick you’ve got with this operator that you don’t have on the Advanced Image Search page is that you can specify filtetype:jpeg or filetype:jpg, which gives you different results (the advanced page includes only an option for JPG). Use it like this: “poker chips” filetype:jpg.

Site is also part of the Advanced Image Search, and you can use it to limit your searches to particular sites or domains, which include segments of the Web like .com and .net, and also countries, like .au (Australia) and .fr (France). The site syntax is especially handy when you want to restrict your results to images from Web sites from a certain country, like this: sitcom site:UK, which gives you pictures
from British sites. And if you know that something you want to see is somewhere on one large site, use it like this: friends site:nbc.com.