More image search

Coming home on the train early yesterday evening, I found myself standing near a young man wearing a gold pin, involving a crown and an upper case 'E', in his lapel. He was busy with his young lady so I did not like to ask what it was.

So back home, I try various search terms, various subsets of gold, badge, lapel, crown, letter and E, without much success at all.

I then thought to try sketching the pin and feeding the result into google image search. The first one, on the left in red, produced very little indeed, beyond the observation that it was probably a line drawing. The second one, on the right in black, fared rather better, pulling up lots of line drawings, for some reason, nearly all nude life studies. What got into the google algorithm which matches search results with client preferences?

In any event, the story seems to be that google image search does not really do line drawings, being geared up for photographs. It did not even seem to have worked out either the crown or the letter E. Maybe what it actually does is compute some statistical function of the colours used over the image and matches on that, some fancy version of the colour mix, so accounting for the failure to do much with line drawings.

While I had vaguely thought that it might work by extracting a diagram from the image being searched for and matching that diagram with the diagrams it had stored from other images out on the net. With the diagrams functioning as an index. On this story, my supplying google with a diagram in the first place would have been helpful, as one could then be more or less sure that it would get that diagram, that half of the match, right.

Maybe a next step would be for google to allow the image to be qualified by text search terms. Maybe there is already a way to do that, but I have yet to find it.