Searching for art just got better. Where will you start?
While some are drawn to the strong brushstrokes of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, others prefer gazing at the gilded glory of Klimt’s The Kiss, but one thing is certain: people love art. In fact, each month, there are more than 500 million art-related searches on Google. Now whether you’re a casual fan or a true culture vulture, Google can help you become an art expert. Starting today, when you search for art-related things, you’ll have access to more relevant results and the ability to dive deeper into topics of interest. We’ve also added a new feature in Street View (think digital museum guide!) that gives you key insights about the artworks on your virtual museum visits.
Explore more art right from Google Search
To help make your search for art a masterpiece, the Google Arts & Culture team joined forces with Google Search engineers to improve how our systems understand and recognize artworks, the places you can see them in person, the artists who made them, the materials they used, the art period they belong to and the connections among all these.
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 Arts & Culture, your virtual museum guide
You can visit hundreds of museums around the world right from your laptop with Google Maps and Google Arts & Culture. And starting today your virtual Street View tour is more informative on desktop and in the Chrome browser on mobile. Now as you walk through the rooms of the museums on Google Maps you’ll see clear and useful annotations on the wall next to each piece. Clicking on these annotations will bring you to a new page with more information provided by hundreds of the world’s renowned museums. You’ll also be able to zoom into high-resolution imagery—getting you closer to these iconic works than you ever thought possible.
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.
Discovering the art world has never been easier on Google, and we hope this inspires you to brush up on your art knowledge. So take a moment. Dive in. Who knows—with a stroke of luck, you may find yourself drawn...to art!
