Web Watch:
Searching for Images
Susan M. Deysher
CAST, Inc.
Increasingly, students are required to search for images using the Internet and then work with the images they find in various ways. In one class, students studying forests might be asked to pick a region of the United States and assemble a report using images and text to describe the kinds of trees found in that region's forests. In another class, students learning visual literacy skills might be asked to locate advertisements featuring children and then compare the ways children have been portrayed by advertisers over the years.
Both of these assignments offer an opportunity to learn advanced Internet search skills. In addition to searching by topic for appropriate websites (e.g., U.S. southeastern forests), students can learn how to use the image search capabilities now offered by several of the major search engines, such as Google Image Search, AltaVista Image Search, and Yahoo! Picture Gallery. Both Google and AltaVista allow for basic searching as well as advanced searching where Boolean operators, site and domain delimiters, and types of images returned can all be specified by the user. Yahoo! Picture Gallery allows basic keyword searching as well as "drilling down" through Yahoo categories.
Yahoo! Picture Gallery primarily searches through images owned by its partner Corbis.com, which limits use of Corbis images to Yahoo services, such as Yahoo! Greetings to send greeting cards, Yahoo! GeoCities to build Web pages, and Yahoo! Briefcase to save images for later use. Google and AltaVista search the whole Internet, although AltaVista also has a partnership with RollingStone.com to search through its image collection. Because Google and AltaVista allow access to what would otherwise be unfiltered content, Google includes a Mature Content Filter and AltaVista includes a Family Filter. These filters are turned on by default, but Google and AltaVista caution users that these filters are not fool-proof, which provides a good teaching opportunity to focus on appropriate searches for images on the Internet. Class assignments involving searching for and using images found on the Web also raise the need to teach students about copyright issues and proper acknowledgment of image sources.