As some of you might probably remember, last month I posted a blog post titled “Windows Live Image Search” on my blog which in turn happened to be spotted and blogged about on a Live Community Blog by Kevin Briody a Consumer Community Marketing Manager for Windows Live at Microsoft.

Ok but what’s so significant about all this, well it happens to be that not long after submitting my feedback to the Windows Live Image Search Team and also appearing on Kevin Briodys Blog, that my college photo I originally could not find appeared in Windows Live Image Search, is this just a coincidence or is it that my actual feedback made the team manually include my image, it’s not an impossibility after all! 😉

Well whatever it was, my college image now appears, but what about other images, what about an image of myself, has Windows Live Image Search improved a great deal enough over the past month or so that it can now find an image of me amongst other things.

Let’s do some tests to find out:

Test Number 1:

First let’s see if that Capitalization problem has now been solved:

http://www.live.com/#q=medway%20college&scope=images&page=results
http://www.live.com/#q=Medway%20college&scope=images&page=results

Results: Capitalization problem now solved on all search queries!

Test Number 2:

Ok now what about what I really would like to know, that is if Windows Live Image Search can find a photo of me without too much effort, so let’s do a search for my full name without using quotes in Windows Live Image Search and compare them with the different image search engines and see what we get:

http://images.ask.com/pictures?q=darren+straight
http://search.msn.com/images/results.aspx?q=darren+straight
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=darren%20straight
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=darren+straight
http://www.live.com/#q=darren%20straight&scope=images&page=results

Results:

Ask: Not one single image of me or anything to do with me, very worrying!
MSN: No images of myself but plenty of my holiday photos.
Google: Only shows 2 old images from my website to do with the windows vista wordpress theme I used to have install and, though if you click “repeat the search with the omitted results included.” at the end of page 11 then you are presented with more images, mainly from my holidays, but still it doesn’t have any photos of me!
Yahoo: Just like Ask, it doesn’t have one single image of me or anything to do with me.
Live Search: Great search results, we have a clear winner, well at least for my name because it found 3 images of me and one of Romain from heaven on my Flickr account which is kind of related, but it failed to find anything else that MSN or Google found, mainly all of my holiday photos.

Ohh and there were a couple of indecent images there as well, which I was disappointed to see as they weren’t related to me at all.

Test Number 3:

This is just an extra test I thought I would do to see how many images are indexed in each search engine when searching my name joined together with no quotes: “darrenstraight”

ASK: Nothing!
MSN: 3 results containing “darrenstraight” (0.50 seconds)
Google: 499 results containing “darrenstraight” (0.30 seconds)
Yahoo: Nothing!
Live Search: 9 Results, looks like Windows Live Image search still needs to index a hell of a lot more images.

Ok so I guess these tests prove that Windows Live Image Search is getting better, but it still has someway to go on indexing all those images out there.

But hey it does have more images than Yahoo and Ask and you also have to remember that Google has been indexing images for much longer!

And as for those indecent images, well Windows Live Image Search doesn’t have a customisable image filter yet but we can expect to see a customisable one soon, because if you search for the word sex you are then presented with the following message:

This query has triggered our safe search filter.
Flexible settings are coming soon.

Which let’s us know that a flexible filter settings are coming soon, which is great to know.

Anyway that’s round 2 of Image Search Done; expect a round 3 some time in the future!