Do a Google web search for a word or phrase, and Google will immediately pull up millions of web page results. With a few advanced search commands learned, you can make Google quickly filter out results you don’t need. What many don’t realize is that Google’s advanced image search can perform the same type of search refinement for you, bringing you ever more relevant images faster than you ever imagined. However, Google image search was not always so versatile.

When Google image search started, if you searched for, say, Vogue magazine covers, you would surely get what you wanted: Vogue magazine covers, but for starters, you’d get foreign-language editions of Vogue, you’d get them. without sorting by date and you would easily get magazine covers that had nothing to do with Vogue. Many additional enhancements have been added lately that make image searches just as productive as web searches. What you can do today with Google’s advanced image search easily rivals how close you can get to your desired results with text.

For starters, Google image search has long had the feature where you can choose the image size and color quality. However, with the latest version of Google Image Search, once you have your home page from hundreds of image results, you can refine them on the fly based on image type (clip art, faces, etc.), differentiate public domain images from those protected by copyright. some, and much more. And the way you do it is the same, whichever way you want Google’s advanced image search to refine your results page: enter the basic search string you want to use and when your results page appears, select one of several different refinement parameters in the left margin.

There’s so much more you can refine your search with if you drill down with the Advanced Search button below the search box. Here, you can limit yourself to one image, for example, that is free for different levels of use: you can select from the options given to you in the usage rights. However, no matter how free you seem to be to use something, you must remember to credit the source from which it came. And that would be especially safe considering that Google has been known to mislabel images from time to time.