Image search is taking a new twist at Google.

New Google Search Image Categories
Facial recognition slipped into Google image search

Google is apparently taking facial recognition technology to heart by experimenting with facial recognition online. Even cooler (or creepier, as the case may be), one day Google’s image search may be able to find faces of specific people based on image analysis/recognition alone instead of relying on the text associated with that image to identify the person in the photo.

Google Images allows you to restrict your search to a specific category – albeit in an “unofficial” mode only – and one of these categories may well be powered by actual image recognition (as opposed to textual keyword analysis). Right now, the available modes are (at least) the following:

• show everything (the default old search)
• show faces
• show news images

But there doesn’t seem to be anything in the interface to trigger this – you have to resort to appending a parameter named “imgtype” to the result URL, with the values “face” or “news”.

append &imgtype=face append &imgtype=news