Google Images: A Great Way to Do Product Research

Google Images is an index of over 390 million images available on the Web. It’s a great way to visually search for products in the category of the invention or product area you are working on.

Let’s say you are working on a new hammer innovation and you want to find out what’s out there in the marketplace. Google images will quickly bring you up to speed on the world of hammers.

Simply type in “hammer “and you’ll see 26,900,00 pictures of hammers. You can use these results to quickly scan thousands of images of hammers.  It’s amazing! I love it and highly recommend you use Google Images.

Maybe you’re looking for

• products similar to yours
• competing products
• products with different features
• stimulation to help you come up with new product ideas

Whatever you are looking for, you will see more pictures of hammers on Google Images than anywhere else in the world!

You should always do a Google images search to understand the product area you are working in. It’s a great way to quickly do your market research.

Let’s say I’m working on a new hammer product that’s super heavy duty and it's made of fiberglass.

Maybe searching for, “heavy duty fiberglass hammer” will refine things a bit and I’ll have fewer images to look over.  Ok, I got 32,600 images using the new keywords, “heavy duty fiberglass hammer”.

Oh, but wait, I forgot to include “sledge hammer”, so let’s add that in there. Let’s search for  “heavy duty fiberglass sledge hammer”. I got 6,650 hits. I think you get the idea.

Of course you can use more advanced keyword searching techniques to pin point exactly what you are looking for and get those numbers down to hundreds of images or even less. However, I don’t have time to go into that sort of detail in this blog post. I encourage you to use one of the many free detailed tutorials on keyword searching you can find on the Internet to further refine your keyword searching skills.

The beauty of Google Images is that you can very quickly scan a lot of images to do your research. Every Product Developer, Inventor and Entrepreneur with a product should use Google images. It’s a great way to get familiar with a particular type of product.

http://images.google.com/

In my next post I will cover an additional method you can add to your product research tool kit that will simply blow you away and dramatically speed up your research time.