Art on Google Search: Some are drawn to the bold brushstrokes of Van Gogh's The Starry Night, others prefer to gaze at the artful glory of Klimt's The Kiss, but one thing is for sure: people love art. In fact, more than 500 million art-related searches are conducted on Google Search every month. Now whether you're a casual art fan or a culture buff, Google can help you become an art expert.
Starting today, when you search for topics related to art, you’ll have access to more relevant results and the ability to explore deeper into the topics you’re interested in. Google also added a new feature to Street View (think “digital museum guide!”) that gives you background knowledge about artworks on your virtual museum visits.
Explore more about art through Google Search
To help you make your art search a… masterpiece, the Google Arts & Culture team joined forces with Google search engineers to improve the way Google's systems understand and recognize works of art, the places we can see them up close, the artists who created them, the materials they used, the artistic period they belong to, and the connections between all of these.
Now when you search for an artist like Gustav Klimt, you'll see an interactive information panel that highlights ways you can explore at a higher level, like viewing a collection of the artist's work or even browsing museums where you can see the paintings on the wall. And for some works, you can click to see the high-resolution image from Google Arts & Culture.
Google Arts & Culture, the virtual museum guide
You can visit hundreds of museums around the world from your laptop with Google Maps and Google Arts & Culture. Starting today, your virtual tour in Street View is more informative on your computer screen and in the Chrome browser on your mobile. Now as you navigate through museum rooms in Google Maps, you'll see clear and helpful wall annotations next to each work.
Clicking on these comments will take you to a new page with more information provided by hundreds of well-known museums. You'll also be able to zoom in on high-resolution images - bringing you closer to these iconic works than you ever imagined.
To create these features, Google deployed its optical recognition software. Similar to how machine learning technology lets you search for files in your photo library on Google Photos, this software scanned the walls of museums around the world, identifying and categorizing more than 15,000 works.
Discovering the world of art has never been easier on Google, and Google hopes this will inspire you to brush up on your art knowledge. So take some time. Dive in. And who knows, with a… touch of luck, you might get carried away by art.
