List of Image Search Engines

Imagery

Imagery has a cool tabbed search interface to browse your searched images. Just keep searching new image terms, which keep compiling in new tabs, click to load full size image at the bottom or in new window. Loads 20-100 images at a time in ajax-y fashion. Best for research and keep collecting all your search images easily. You can tweak preferences to select JPG, GIF or PNG, sort by size, sort by black and white, grayscale or color and of course get safe for work images too. Test

Google Images Search

Google Image Search is probably the most common image search engine you might have used. Gives you thousands of image results very fast. But a limitation is you need to click to the image source page to see the full size image (Power it up with Google Image Ripper to get no more thumbnails and load full size images directly). You can sort images by JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG, sort by b&W or color, with an option for extra large images. You can also search news content and faces too! (Face test). Improve Google Image Search results using the Google Image Labeler. Use more filters to stop that NSFW image with moderate filtering or strict filtering. Test.

Yahoo! Image Search

Yahoo Image Search will find photos and clicking on images will take you to the source page with a framed interface, with an option to mail to a friend. You can opt for color and b&w by quick links. Select photo size with a wallpaper mode too which gives you images on all usual desktop sizes (Test wallpapers). It gives related searches too at the bottom of results. Its also powers the AlltheWeb search engine. Test.

Ask Images

Ask Images Search will search your desired images and suggest ways to expand or narrow your search for better results. A unique preference is finding buddy icons (Test). It will suggest related information from Wikipedia, videos from Youtube, news, profiles and more. Test.

MSN Live Image Search

MSN Live Image Search searches through all images of your choice. One cool option is to search “Showing only images of your desktop size” to find that ideal wallpaper even if you do not know your display settings. Another cool feature is you can drag images from the search results to a scratchpad and create a photo collection. Find related results. You can adjust a slider to see smaller thumbnails and fit in more photos. Test

AltaVista Image Search

AltaVista Image Search has similar search results, with an option to select graphics and buttons / banners too. You can also quickly sort by a huge range of prefixed desktop sizes and very useful to find wallpapers for your desktop (Test 1024×768 wallpapers). Clicking on “more info” below those images will take you a list of all webpages that host that same image. Test

Picsearch

PicSearch claims to index 2 billion images on the web. All images are output-ed as thumbnails and click through to a framed page with the original source. Selecting the preferences you can select only animations only. You can also sort images by various image sizes based by pixels (Test <50px). And they are family friendly images by default, which cannot be changed. Test. It also powers Ditto.

Exalead Image Search Engine

Exalead will let you change the background to black or white. Then you can customize it to find few prefixed size desktop wallpapers. It can also search faces. You can again choose color or B&W and image sizes. You can click on options to view direct image links with no frames. Or click the image to browse the images and their source sites in frames. Test.

Pixsy

Pixsy will let you search and extract images from popular free image hosting services Webshots, Photobucket, Sevenload, SuperiorPics, ViewImages etc. Switch the media type to Images in the drop down options. Clicking the image will take you to the framed page, where you can browse images, and see source page. You can email or save to ‘My Pixsy’ too. Test.

Visoo

Visoo uses the power of its Visual Content Analysis to provide highly accurate information on the visual content contained within digital images, information that cannot be obtained from any other online source. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, it recognizes text in graphics and images and can even analyze colored type or transparent text on any background. You can also check the People option for face recognition and select no banners.

Netvue

Netvue is another cool image search tool. The images are organized as a slideshow, you can regulate the slide show speed and even turn it off. Browse thumbnail images to a central window, with links to original full size image source.

Cyclo.ps

As a stock photography search engine, it keeps both eyes on sites like BigStockPhoto, Flickr, Fotolia, Cutcaster, StockVault, Photos.com, ShutterStock and stockx.xchng. The search interface is typically simple and you can search by selecting specific stock photo sites or all of them in one go. A horizontal menu and also a dropdown let you view results by respective site.

Spffy

Search out the image or video you want using Spffy’s multiple searches. Spffy checks out a cross-section of sources like stock photo sites, web sources like Flickr, public domain sites and videos from YouTube.

Incogna

The Canada-based search engine company looks at the visual shape rather than the meta-data. This gives rather interesting results which are distinct from the others profiled here. The image search is fast though the number of results is not plentiful. You enter a keyword and then select an image from the results to do a similarity search.

Picfindr

PicFindr searches the web* for stock photography that is completely free to use commercially.PicFindr is a rich internet application (RIA) that helps you search several stock image and photo community sites simultaneously.

Everystockphoto

Search engine for free stock photos and clip art for the stock photography community including images of creative commons and public domain and other free sites.

Labnol: Search Pictures on Flickr, MySpace, Facebook ..

This image search engine lets you find photos that are on Facebook, Flickr, Zooomr, MySpace, US Government sites, Photobucket, Corbis, deviantart, Webshots, Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.

It is powered by Google AJAX Search API and therefore has all the goodies that are only available in Google Images.