DuckDuckGo‘s Image Search has had another expansion. It was already rather good, and now it’s even better.

Finding Extra Large: Extra Large has been added as a filter. This is the main improvement, though in practice it appears this means 1024px or higher. Whereas for a magazine I’d call Extra Large 2048px or higher and even then it would be too small for a double-page spread. Still, the new filter is much better than the fairly useless old ‘Large’ option, which was as high as the Duck used to be able to fly.

Finding Clipart: ‘Types’ includes ‘Animated’, for all your dancing hamster needs. Perhaps that was there before, but I don’t remember it. Definitely new is ‘Transparent’, allowing searches only for isolated items on a transparent background. Sadly you can’t combine ‘Transparent’ + ‘Photograph’ together, so a simple search tends to be awash with very naff clipart when you add “creative commons attribution” and combine it with ‘Extra Large’. Also ‘Transparent’ often appears to give false positives. Still, it’s nice to see it being tried by a major search engine.

Black and White: You can also search by one of many colours or just black-and-white (greyscale). You can usefully chain ‘Black-and-White’ for a search for large Creative Commons pictures. Though this will tend to pick up blogs where the text is CC but the pictures discussed are not (or are doubtful, perhaps being from that one idiot on Flickr who’s put tens of thousands of superb vintage pictures under CC when they’re not).

There’s also ‘Proportion’ (square, tall, wide).

Possibly the ‘Regions’ filter has also had a makeover, but I never use it so I’m not sure. However I certainly don’t remember it had mini-flags before, or so many nations.