All The Web Picture Search and Google Image Search are the two best image search engines on the Web. Alta Vista Image Search and Ditto are also very useful. However, Alta Vista retrieves more irrelevant results than Google or All The Web, and its thumbnail images are less clear. Ditto is a much smaller engine than the rest and seems to have frequent technical problems.
All The Web's Picture Search contains an extensive index of pictures, and its search capabilities are unsurpassed. It is second in size only to Google.
Choose the ‘Pictures’ link above the search box to search for images. Use plus and minus signs to require or forbid a word and quotation marks to indicate a phrase. Searching with one- or two-word phrases usually retrieves the most relevant results. Adding more search words increases the number of irrelevant items returned.
To further specify the kind of images you retrieve, click on ‘Advanced Search’ after you have chosen to search for pictures. This mode offers menu choices for formats (jpeg, gif, bmp), types of images (color, grayscale, line art) and backgrounds (transparent, non-transparent).
The results displayed on All The Web are well-designed, with 8-10 results per page. Each result includes a thumbnail image, along with the dimensions of the original image in pixels, size in kilobytes, and image type. Clicking on the microscope icon produces the original image.
Clicking on the image gives you a larger image and additional information about it, including the file name and size, image dimensions, format, MIME type, when it was last modified, and its transparency. There is also a link to the page containing the image.
Google Image Search
Google's Image Search index contains over 250 million images. Google is fast, its relevance rate is above average, and thumbnails are sharp and clear. By default, Google requires every search word you enter to appear in each item retrieved.
You can limit your search to a specific filetype extension (e.g, jpg, gif, bmp) by clicking the ‘Advanced Search’ link. You can also restrict searching to a specific site by using the site: operator (e.g, site:akc.org bulldog).
Information given for each image includes the name of the image file, the dimensions of the image in pixels and its size in kilobytes, and the url of the page the image appears on.
Clicking on the image produces two half screens. The upper half contains a larger size of the image, while the scrollable lower half contains the web page the image appears on. Clicking on the image in the top half of the screen displays the original image.
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