Are you familiar with Google Images? It's a search engine, run by Google, which as you might guess from its name searches for images instead of text in Web pages. It's perhaps not as well-known as Google's Web search but it still indexes millions of images.

Now Google has expanded the searchable material on Google Images with the addition of a collection of images from LIFE Magazine. This includes items produced and owned by LIFE and not merely those which have appeared in the magazine -- in fact, the majority of images in the search engine have not appeared in the magazine! At the moment Google has about two million of the images in its search engine, but over the next few months or so will expand that to the complete collection strength of about ten million images.

The home page for the collection is http://images.google.com/hosted/life. From there you can search it like Google's Web search, with just a few keywords. I did a search for North Carolina and got about 200 results. From the searches I tried it looks like "about 200" is the most results you'll get for any search, so I did a more specific search for Raleigh.

I got 52 results for that one. As you might expect there were many Sir Walter Raleigh illustrations and portraits, but also several Raleigh-location related pictures, including debutantes in the 40s, the Art Museum in the 50s, and Jonathan Daniels of the News and Observer in the 30s (here gazing at the camera, there enjoying a bottle of Coke.)

One thing that annoyed me about this search is the inability to break down searches by decade. I could do a search for North Carolina 1946 and get shots of different lighthouses taken in 1946, but I could not do a search and get all images taken of North Carolina-related subjects in the 1940s. If you really want to look at all the shots of a particular decade you can add to your search the years in parentheses separated by the "pipe" symbol, like this:

(1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | 1949)

(I'm sure as Google adds more images they'll also add more ways of refining image results, especially if you can only get about 200 results for an image search.)

So what happens when you find an image you like? If you run that 40s search above with the words North Carolina, for example, you'll get a great picture of Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice. If you click on the picture you'll get an even larger picture with data about the image, including where and when it was taken and by whom. Sometimes there are annotations with pictures, sometimes not.

If you really REALLY like a picture, click on the "Purchase image merchandise" link underneath the LIFE logo, which will give you the opportunity to buy prints.

I like this collection a lot. I'll like it even more when it's complete and you can do some kind of date search without having to drag out the long string of numbers and pipe symbols.