Imagery – The Best Advancement Yet In Image Searching

Image searching has become somewhat of a staple among search engines. Google began offering it in 2001 followed by Yahoo! and even the image-only search startup Picsearch.

Be that as it may, little improvement has been made since then to the searching process or to the interface with which users must interact. When searching for images using any of the top 3 engines mentioned above, visitors must scan small thumbnails, then click to nagivate to a framed version of the page containing the image, and then click again to see a full-size version the image they are seeking. This can be a very tedious and time-consuming task, not to mention the excessive use of the 'Back' button required to view multiple images.

This is where Imagery, an image search engine developed by one-man team Eliazar Parra Cardenas, comes in to offer a fresh perspective in finding images on the web.

With Imagery, each thumbnail is directly beside the next, due to the lack of an underlying description (a shared feature among the top three), which allows for more space to display results. By default, 20 images are displayed at a time (a setting that can be altered up to 100), but users will primarily notice the large gray block that remains unused at the bottom of the results page. This is where any image result will be displayed full-size when selected, and multiple images can be stored here. That's right… there is no visiting other sites as Imagery extracts only the image to be displayed within the engine itself.

Hovering over any result temporarily hides the image and displays a basic graphic meant to represent the amount of space the full-size image will occupy in proportion to a user's monitor. A toolbar is also displayed atop the thumbnail, allowing users to visit the original source page, open the image in a pop-up window, or remove that image from the results.

Once an image is selected and viewed full-size at the bottom of the page, more options are presented to users. Here, when hovering over the full-size images, there is the ability to fit an image to your screen, zoom in or out, or return to original size. Other than this, Imagery also has some very simple, yet thoughtful additions. Once an image is stored in the bottom box, it's thumbnail in the results become grayed-out so that users can easily spot which image they have already viewed. In addition, tabs can be used on Imagery (similar to Firefox) allowing users to perform multiple searches at one time.

One of the only drawbacks of Imagery (if it is indeed a drawback) is the fact that the site will only work in Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or newer. However, since Firefox is still eating away at Internet Explorer's market share and it is available in just about any language for any OS, this shouldn't be too much of a problem for anyone except die-hard Microsoft fans.

Cardenas primary inspiration for Imagery came from the realization that Google Images poorly utilized available screen space, leaving too much white space between results and much to be desired. "I started thinking on this project soon after getting a 23" monitor and getting irritated by all the space that was being wasted when googling for images," states Cardenas. "Reading the oh so painfully beautiful book Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte, inspired me in many ways, specially to try to find a better way to show image sizes."

Two other image search engines that have developed new, intuitive user interfaces are NetVue and MediaMingle, both of which utilize a 2-column layout with thumbnail results in the smaller left column while the full-size version of any selected image displays in the other.

In case you were wondering whether the premise of Imagery could be used for traditional searching, Cardenas has already worked on Domburi, which is a search engine that allows any search result to be opened within the simplified Domburi search results page at a user-defined height (with choices of 33%, 50%, 66%, and 100%).

The best statement in the description of Imagery reads, "This is a prototype, a proof of concept that image searching can be improved," which the Imagery interface has done a great job of showing. What do you think of Imagery? Is it about time for Google to make some updates to Google Image Search?