First Exalead adds an option to limit your image search to faces, then Google, and now Live Search has joined the gang. In terms of ease of use, it is not as slick as Exalead’s but not quite as clunky as Google’s. You first of all carry out a search in Live Images and then add filter:face to your search search strategy or filter:portrait. If you want to look for black and white images you add filter:bw. At present you have to remember the commands but they say they are looking at how to make these features intuitively accessible through a drop-down menu or some other means.

On my image test searches on Live.com I cannot honestly say it was better or worse than Exalead or Google. None of them are perfect. They do remove most of the non-people images but all three also lose relevant faces and ‘portraits’.

Thomas Hawk has reported on his blog that Yahoo has integrated Flickr photos into its image search. It is an obvious move but has been a long time coming - Yahoo bought Flickr in March 2005.

A quick check by searching on UKeiG, though, revealed that Yahoo.com image search includes Flickr but the UK and Ireland version does not.

Hot on the heels of Exalead’s new face recognition search option, Google has launched a similar feature. Unlike Exalead, which has a ‘Face’ option under ‘Narrow your search’, Google requires you to add &imgtype=face to the end of the URL of your results page. As Phil Bradley says in his blog “A simple button would suffice guys!”. Phil also reports that, although clunky, Google’s face search seems to return more and better results than Exalead’s. My own experience is variable: sometimes Exalead is better, sometimes Google. Which just goes to prove that you really do need to know your way around more than one search engine.

Exalead now has a UK version of its search engine that includes an option to limit your search to UK pages only. Both Exalead.com and UK have added a Wikipedia search and options to limit your results to blogs or forums. Alternatively, you can choose to exclude those types of sites. The Wikipedia search includes a “Narrow your search” panel on the results page that lists ‘tags’ for categories, related terms, people, location and organizations.

Exalead has also launched a new version of its image search with over one billion images indexed. The new ‘Face’ filter enables you to narrow your search results to images containing faces. It is not a hundred per cent accurate and sometimes excludes images that are of faces and includes some in which there are no faces at all, but it is close enough. Other options include size of image, wallpapers, image colour, layout and file type.