Mountain View (CA) - Google has updated its image search engine by adding new filters to restrict results to specific categories.

The most ambitious new filter is one that will only bring up results of images where someone's face is shown. For example, a face image search for Paris will weed out any Eiffel Tower images and just show essentially a montage of Paris Hilton.

This comes as the first major project for Google that makes use of its acquisition of Neven Vision, a technology firm specializing in "object recognition". The search engine giant acquired Neven Vision in August of last year.

Another new filter option is to only show images that are linked to news stories. This basically restricts the results to professional images and file photos.

According to the Google-centric blog Blogoscope, the update came side by side with Google's new translation service. There is no official search option for the new filters, but users can add &imgtype=face to the end of any search result URL to restrict the results to "face" images, or do the same with the tag &imgtype=news to get results tied to news websites.