Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Sprixi , a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches. Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds , Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results. Sponsor The crowdsourced curation of images is what elevates Sprixi above other image searches. A Google Image search for "baseball" returns photos of varying qualities of balls, players, fields, video games and team logos. The same search on Sprixi uncovers a stunning photograph of a baseball laying in grass that has a "usefullness" rating 25.7. With no login required to browse and download photos, Sprixi displays the copyright information of each photo and can even embed the information into the photo for you, making the process of giving credit quick and painless. Discuss

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Sprixi Makes Searching for Free Photos Smart, Fast and Painless

Google just announced a new product in Google Labs: Google Image Swirl . Image Swirl introduces a Wonder Wheel-like user interface for Google Images. The new search interface combines the Wonder Wheel experience with Google's ability to find similar images and discover faces in these images. Instead of just showing one image, the Image Swirl interface displays a stack of photos. Clicking on this stack opens up a Wonder Wheel with related images clustered around the original photo. Sponsor For now, Image Swirl only works for about 200,000 queries, though Google plans to include more in the near future. Better Photo Search Through Smarter Algorithms This new feature takes image search to a new level, as it doesn't just display the most relevant images. Instead, Google notes, these "are the most relevant groups of images." To create these clusters of related images, Google analyzes the characteristics of the images themselves, but the algorithm also looks at meta tags and other clues in the description of these images. Google uses the same algorithms to find and organize images of landmarks in its index. In an interview with eWeek , Google Image Swirl Product Manager Aparna Chennapragada said that this is new service is part of Google drive to "go beyond just relying on text." Bing introduced its visual search feature a few weeks ago and is still ahead of Google in bringing these features to its core search product. Image Swirl makes looking for images on Google a far more interactive and fun experience. For now, Image Swirl is only a labs product - and some of the results can be a bit off at times - but chances are that this feature will find its way into the search options panel on Google Images in the future. Discuss

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Google Image Swirl Brings the Wonder Wheel to Photo Search