Drag and Drop Google Image Search

Google Image search is now drag and drop friendly:

So I will give you a demonstration. First, I searched for ‘mean girls’ and then dragged in a picture to see what results Google will spit back out:

You cannot just drag and drop the image straight away – you need to hover over it, wait for it to enlarge and then drag and drop it into the search box. You wil know if this is possible by the little ‘camera’ symbol in the search box and when you drag the image close to the search box it will expand.

My results looked like this:

It takes you into Universal Search. Unfortunately, Google has registered the image or pulled the term ‘mean girls the plastics’ from somewhere and automatically added this into the search as a ‘best guess’. The visually similar images are largely from the film.

What I was really looking for was my search story – I wanted Google to come back and tell me this image of a character from Mean Girls is the actress Rachel McAdams and what else she has been in via images.

I have also discovered that paid search ads currently do not appear for image drag and dropped searches – e.g. I dragged an image of a remote island into the search box, it came back with ‘holiday island resort’ as the best guess but there were no paid search ads. However if I seach for ‘holiday island resort’ in normal web search, I do get paid ad results.

In future, if paid ads could appear, there could be room to optimize towards certain images.