Tip: Google Images

Have you ever needed a picture of the Sydney Opera House? What does the Idaho state flag look like? Do you want to see the wind?

Visit http://images.google.com to find images by looking at them. Instead of searching for information or text, you can search for just the right picture visually.

When you’re looking at the pictures on the results page, you can hover your cursor over an image to get more information. It tells things like the size of the image, the file type, and where the image is hosted. If you use ‘advanced search’, you can limit or filter by color, size, aspect ratio, or even color!

There are some risks by searching for images. Use the filtering of ‘SafeSearch’. Here are instructions from Google…

Enable the SafeSearch filter

1. Visit the Google Preferences page.
2. In the SafeSearch Filtering section, choose the SafeSearch level you’d like to use:
   • Moderate filtering: This option excludes most explicit images from Google Images results but doesn’t filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you’ll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
   • Strict filtering: This applies SafeSearch filtering to both image and web search results.
   • No filtering: This option turns SafeSearch filtering off completely.
3. Click Save Preferences when you’re done setting your preferences. 

Give image search a try!

FYI – if you look for images of the wind, you’ll see turbines and clipart and trees blowing, but not really the wind. 🙂