It is Google’s stated mission to digitize and index all information on the planet. They seem to get closer every day.

I’m not sure when this feature was released, but I just noticed today that you can now filter your Google image results by color. I apologize if I am way behind the times here, but that is pretty cool. Once upon a time, most of us thought that pictures were untouchable. Google and the other search engines had proximal tools like surrounding context and alt tags, but as far as the actual content of a picture was concerned, well, that was just too much to ask.

Now, I understand that mining color values from picture files is probably not the most groundbreaking adventure ever as flickr interfaces have been doing that for years, it’s the force behind the technology that makes me tingle. Google is trying harder than ever to actually index the information present in a picture directly. They will not settle, and it seems they will not sleep until it’s done. That means look for maybe a checkbox for “includes people” or what’s even more exciting: being able to search by uploading pictures. I know, sounds impossible, but I’m sure that’s where they want to be, and they will get there.

Yes, that’s still a long way off it seems technology wise, but I’m just saying it’s exciting. What does all this mean for us as tat artists and business owners? Well, you now have a new search criteria which might grab some traffic for your site. For example, it’s possible that an individual can now make a search for butterfly pictures, and filter to only see results containing a large amount of orange. Well, if you have a picture on your site that you think might be a great result for a search like “orange butterfly” but your picture is full of green grass in the background and is zoomed out so that the butterfly tat is very small, maybe you will miss that opportunity. So I guess all I am saying is two things. One, Google wishes that it could physically look at every picture in the world and know exactly what is in it so that they can point people at it. This includes video, sound files, pdfs, and every other kind of file on this planet or others. So remember that as you build your site. Two, make sure you take good pictures, because the better Google gets at the above goal, the more rewarded you will be for taking them. (Regardless of Google, please take good pictures. They pay for themselves in sales every time.)

PS: the picture for this article came from a orange filtered Google image search for “google.” There’s a little ff, a fun fact.