Google keeps talking about the real-time web and that how quickly it can respond to “real-time” events. The moment Google algorithms discover breaking news (like the earthquake in Haiti or the Toyota brakes issue), it triggers real-time search and starts pulling tweets, news stories and even blog posts into the main search results.
This works nicely but there’s one area where Google is still lacking – image search.
Steve Jobs introduced the much-awaited Apple iPad to the world on January 27, 2010. The news was covered by almost every blog and news website, millions of tweets were written for the iPad and thousands of images and videos from that Apple event were shared on sites like Flickr and YouTube.
With so much excitement around the device, the disappointing part is that though a week has passed since we saw the first iPad unit, Google Images still has no clue about the existence of this Apple device.
Try a simple search for “iPad” on Google Image search and you’ll only see mockups but none of these images represent the official Apple gadget. Move to page 2 and you’ll find that the story is no different.
In this quick test, Bing did manage to find some images of the Apple iPad on the first page of search results but the top slots were still occupied by mockups.
The surprise winner here was Yahoo. It not only returned the best results for “iPad” but also had a section called “Recent Images” that pulled the very latest photographs of iPad from news stories. Google seriously needs to implement something similar for their “real-time search” as well.
Screenshot 1: iPad search on Google Images
Screenshot 2: iPad on Bing Images
Screenshot 3: iPad according to Yahoo!
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-image-search-problem/12671/
Tags: Archives, image search, ipad, Most Popular, Internet
Reader Comments
I agree, Google Images isn’t up to standard.
I’ve seen that Googlebot/Image hardly comes around, and it doesn’t index all of the original images that are available on a site.
Written by Digitivity on 02.04.10
You’re right.
This is an area where Google seriously lags behind.
Written by Haresh on 02.04.10
try “apple ipad tablet”
they r trying to be as specific as possible in the results!!
Written by chipsy on 02.04.10
I’m not surprised. Yahoo! can at least put some Flickr pics here and there, and Bing presents the data in a fairly nice way. Google doesn’t seem to lead at all in image search.
Written by Quikboy on 02.05.10
I guess you have never used the advanced search feature?
The Google algorithm works fine you just have to use it. Most recent may not always produce a quality result. A search for a simple item could get lost due to a news story that is clogging current headlines. There are more problems with this article than problem with Google Image Search.
Written by Nona on 02.06.10
Google images most of the times suck as compared to yahoo. Yahoo will provide one of the better results when you are searching anything and with the new design of yahoo hone page it works great. i got most of the traffic on my blog through yahoo search engine.
Written by Vivek @ InfoEduTech on 02.07.10