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December 19, 2008

Find Cartoons and Cliparts Using Google Image Search

Google Image Search has two new content restriction options: clip art and line drawings. Besides the two new options, you can restrict the results to faces, photos and illustrations for recent news articles.

"Many of us use Google Image Search to find imagery of people, clip art for presentations, diagrams for reports, and of course symbols and patterns for artistic inspiration. Unfortunately, searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query but aren't in a style that's useful to you," explains Google's blog.


You can find the restrictions in the drop-down that has the default option "any content". After ignoring the content of the images and only indexing the associated text and metadata, image search engine are transitioning to a new model that involves analyzing the images, detecting objects and recognizing patterns.

11 comments:

  1. this is sweet! will save a lot of time..another good one out of google

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  2. Is there a way to make a bookmarklet out of this, so that I can immediately do a search for only clipart, on Google Images--without having to go into the advanced search preferences?

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  3. You don't have go to advanced search, there's a drop-down below the search box.

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  4. OK I see it. You do the image search, and then after your results are shown, you select Clipart below the "any content" option at the top. This is going to be very convenient.

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  5. They should add a "Creative Commons" Tab also, I wonder what the copyright owners will feel about their images on display.

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  6. This is going to work really well when searching for images to insert into Google Presentations.

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  7. Since we're talking about google images, I'm wondering, if I take a picture from a site (say using GI) and change some of the major colors on it, does that give me rights to that picture, or am I still 'stealing'?...or am I splitting hairs altogether?

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  8. @Dan:
    You're creating a derivative work, which is not necessarily allowed. If the image is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution, you can create derivative works and publish them as long as you mention the source and the license.

    From what I know, no major image search engine lets you restrict the results to those that are licensed as Creative Commons, but Flickr has this feature.

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  9. Keep in mind images are copyrighted by the creator(s) of any images appearing in any specific search results. I own and operate my own cartooning service and online image licensing cartoon catalog http://www.danscartoons.com and it is highly recommended that potential users of any images make sure they contact the owner(s) of those images for licensing fees or permission to use those images. Thank you.

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  10. If I write a book for my family ONLY and use a Google Image (in this case on the cover), is that illegal? Should I give attribution if I do use...?

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