if you're looking for a research paper by some scientist. But if you want to find out what said scientist looks like, you're probably out of luck. Sure, AltaVista and Ditto.com offer image searches that mostly examine the file names of images. But if you want to find a picture of a teddy bear, you'd better hope the person who designed the site named the picture "teddybear.jpg" and not "MrFluffy.jpg." Now, with the recent launch of Google Image Search, the prospect of tracking down a specific picture just got a lot more promising. The new service searches a combination of image file names and surrounding content, giving strikingly reliable results. By way of comparison, we road tested a few image search engines with a variety of search types - from generic ideas ("standing in the rain") to specific figures to more-ambiguous terms such as "macintosh." - Ethan Smith
| Google Image Search (beta) | AltaVista Image Search | Ditto.com (formerly Arriba Vista) | |
| Monika Henzinger (Google's Director of Research) | One head shot (found on site of former employer Compaq)  |
177 results, including multiples of the University of California at Berkeley's electrical engineering professor Thomas A. Henzinger and one of a Monika Waldebäck. None is the right person.  |
"Sorry, there are no images matching your search string." |
| Macintosh | A healthy assortment of Apple Macintoshes (the computers) and McIntoshes (the fruit), as well as a swatch of the Macintosh clan tartan.  |
Dozens of Apple company logos, plus a series of photos of a woman shooting her computer. No fruit.  |
A few current PowerMac models, inexplicable photos of the Backstreet Boys, plus a motorcycle and a manual typewriter.  |
| "Standing in the Rain" | Various scenes of people in inclement weather, from Harvard student demonstrators to Colombian coca farmers.  |
Impressive array similar to Google results; tourists in Scotland, families in foul-weather gear and the like.  |
Cover of trumpeter Ron Hynes' Standing in Line in the Rain.  |
| Malcolm X | More than 1,000 results, mostly portraits with a couple of book covers thrown in.  |
Hundreds of images of the leader, skewing toward video boxes, book covers and stamps.  |
Ten percent of 327 results show Martin Luther King's Civil Rights-era rival; the
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