About Google Image Swirl

Google Image Swirl organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarities and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface. To learn more about this project, see our Google Research blog post.

Try this tool to resolve an ambiguous query visually ([apple], [jaguar], [beetle]) or to explore a concept from different visual perspectives ([Eiffel Tower], [beach], [impressionism]).

Frequently Asked Questions

• How does this work?
  Google Image Swirl combines a variety of image similarity features with additional metadata about the images to build a hierarchy of clusters of image search results.
  
• What are the system requirements?
  This demo requires Javascript to be enabled and a Flash plugin to be installed in order to work. It has been tested on Linux (Chrome and Firefox), Windows (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and Mac OS/X (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
• Why are there images in clusters which don't belong?
  The clustering algorithm is fully automatic, and far from perfect. In most cases, computer vision cannot tell us what actually present in an image, and without this semantic information, mistakes will happen. We welcome your feedback about cases which work well and which need more work.
• Why can't I type any query I want?
  Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries and we plan to include more queries in the future. Available queries will auto-complete as you start to type in teh search box, similar to Google Suggest.
  
• How can I report an offensive image?
  We are working to add an offensive image reporting mechanism to this application; until then if you come across an offensive image, please report it using this tool.
• It would be nice if...
  Let us know!
  

Feedback

This is an experimental feature, both in terms of the technology and visualization. We hope that you will enjoy playing with it and tell us how we can improve it. Thank you!

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