Google has come a long way from just being a search engine. Over the years, the company has built up an impressive arsenal of tools, and while some of them are highly specialized, there are a few that are worth knowing about no matter what you use the web for. Google Images, also known as Google Image Search, is just one of those tools, so if you don’t know what it is, or aren’t sure how much it can do, here’s what you need to know.

Google Images is a web-based product from Google for searching for images online. While it performs the same basic query and results retrieval functions as Google's flagship search engine, it is better understood as a specialized fork.

While Google Search produces web pages with text-based content by scanning text-based content directly, Google Images returns image media based on entered keywords, so the process is a little different under the hood. The most important factor in determining which images populate your results page is how closely search terms match image filenames. This by itself usually isn't enough, so Google Images also relies on contextual information based on text on the same page as an image.

As a final ingredient, the algorithm uses primitive machine learning, where Google Images learns to associate certain images with each other to create clusters. This results in the reverse image search function.