What is Reverse Image Search On Google And How You May Use It

Internet is a source of lots of great things and the largest and most accessible source of information that has ever existed. For most of us, Google is a preferable way to navigate this great source and we have come to rely on it for filtering through the huge amounts of data stored on the web and find the specific small things that we are looking for. Google lets us search for article, videos, images, maps and pretty much anything that can interest us on the World Wide Web.

In this post we’ll talk about a slightly different kind od search you can do on Google – Reverse Image Search and why you may find it useful.

So, what exactly is Reverse Image Search?

Typically, when you search for images on Google you would type in a few related keywords, click on images in the top menu and see a selection of them show up on your screen. Reverse Image Search implies that you already have an image uploaded on your computer or at least its URL and are looking for related image content – pictures from the same article, with the same content, of the same event, etc. – you get the picture (pun intended). For instance, you have seen an interesting image in Facebook from an environmental project and would like to find the rest of the set. Or you may want to verify if the image you have found comes from a reputable source or is just an Internet prank. Or you may simply be looking for more photos of your favourite band from their recent concert. You get it, the reasons can be numerous – and Reverse Image Search can help you locate similar images on the web, provided you already have some content to start with.

How do you reverse search images on Google?

As with all things Google, things are pretty much straightforward. Once you get to Google’s home page, look for the Images tab in the top right corner of the page and click on it. Fro there you will be taken to a different search bar. In the right corner of the search bar you will see two icons – “a camera” for Search For Image and “a microphone” for a Voice Search. Click on the Search For Image and you will be taken to yet another search bar – where you will have three options for doing the Reverse Image Search. You can either drag the image directly into the search bar if you have it handy, paste the image’s URL or upload the image from you computer. All the three options are equally efficient in searching for related image content.

If you are using your smartphone, you can make the process even simpler – provided that you are using Google Chrome as your browser for the task. Say you are looking at a photo on a website and would like to bring up more relevant content for it. Simply tap on the image to make it larger – then touch and hold the larger version until you see Search Google For This Image tab pop up. Tap on it – and you will have all the content you asked for pull up in the browser.

What your results may look like?

The main idea behind Reverse Image Search is the locating related imagery or the source of the photo. So, on your results page you may see similar photos, the same photo in different sizes from the original or the web pages where this particular photo or related images can be spotted.