Google Image Telephone

A few days ago, there was an interesting post on B, a really great photo blog you should all be reading. It was about using Google's image search to play a game of Telephone (you know, that game where you whisper a phrase into someone's ear, they repeat it to someone else, and so on, to see how the phrase gets changed). On Google image search, you can upload a photo, and it finds images it 'thinks' are similar.
I tried with a couple of my photos. This one first:

Of the 'similar' images it returned, here are the three I found most interesting:

The top one was my favorite, so I fed that one to Google, and picked my two favorite results:

Again, the first one was my favorite, so I did one more round. Here's my favorite from round three:

The Google search engine is obviously picking up on the red/orange tones in the original photo and using that to match images. I decided to try a black and white photo:

And picked these three as my favorite matches:

The top one was my favorite, so like with the color photos,  I fed that one to Google, and picked my two favorite results:

One more round, using the first of those two photos, and my favorite is:

I learned two things from this. One, Google image search relies on color of images to find matches. Two,  B&W photos on the internet are cooler than color ones.

I do like the randomness in the matches, and how these unrelated images work together. Ultimately, however, it's a fun diversion, but not much more than that. It does give me some ideas. I want to convince some other artist friends to play along with something that could be fun.