Google Improves Arts Search With High-Res Images, Better Indoor Street View Experiences, and More

Google has been pushing to promote arts and culture for a while. Last year, it even revamped its dedicated Google Arts and Culture app that collates all museums for a digital walkthrough, information about artists, artwork in high resolutions, and much more.

Now, Google has amped up its Search and indoor Street View experiences to make art searches richer, complete with high resolution images and interactive knowledge panels. First up, Google Street View improves its indoor museum experience by letting machine learning and its vast database combine together to give you information about works of art inside museums.

So for example, if you are wandering inside a museum on the Street View web or mobile app, you will now see annotations besides each painting, giving you basic information about them. Clicking on them will take you to a new page giving you more detailed information, and even high resolution image that you can zoom into to see all the details.

“To create this feature, we put our visual recognition software to work. Similar to how machine learning technology in Google Photos allows you to search for things in your gallery, this software scanned the walls of participating museums all over the world, identifying and categorizing more than 15,000 works, Google explains in its blog.

This really helps in making the best of your museum walkthrough in Street View, and is Google’s latest effort to better arts knowledge. It also made some tweaks in Search results, so from now onwards, if you search for an artist or any artwork, it will give you an interactive panel with all information related to the artist, their work profile, and much more. Even in search results, you’ll be treated with high resolution images that you can zoom and see to your satisfaction.

“Now when you search an artist like Gustav Klimt, you’ll see an interactive Knowledge Panel that will highlight ways you can explore on a deeper level, like seeing a collection of the artist’s works or even scrolling through the museums where you can view the paintings on the wall. And for some pieces, you can click through to see picture-perfect high-resolution imagery right from Google Arts & Culture,” Google elaborates.