If you spend alot of time online you’ve probably read about this…

Google has added face reognition to Image Search. It’s not officially available yet but you can enable it with a change to to the search url.

What exactly does it do? If you do a search for say Rachael Leigh Cook you’ll see that you don’t only get pictures of people but other odd pictures too, but if you do the search again with the modified url you’ll see that you only get pictures of faces, and the pictures are mostly of her, that s pretty awesome. You can tell it worked because the number of items found have substanously decreased from 24,200 to 3,130.

To enable this feature do a search using Image Search for who ever you’re looking for, then go to the URL address bar and at the end of the URL add &imgtype=face then click go/enter and the results should change.

Supposedly you can also do &imgtype=news to get news only pictures although that didn’t work with the Rachael Leigh Cook test above.

A slightly better search would be do a picture search for Google, you’ll see normally you get a bunch of different pictures but very few faces in the results. Now do the same search but with the &imgtype=face added and you’ll see a bunch of pictures of people related to Google. Now do a search with it set to news and you’ll see a bunch of pictures from various news websites.

Supposedly Google are working on doing better image searches so that they can group pictures in picasa together based on who appears in the photos and perhaps even recognise the location the photo was taken by comparing them to online ones which would be awesome.