Image-searching engines have an oddly philosophical quality to them. The searches are always a little imprecise, because they hunt for pictures not via actual content of the images — Google and Yahoo and Flickr’s engines cannot actually “see” what’s in the picture — but via the keywords associated with the picture, such as the words the webmaster used when they put the pic online.

The upshot is that when you pump a word like “lazy” into an image-searching engine, the results are kind of like a tone-poem of ontology — a drifting set of vaguely-connected pictures, each one illustrating some facet of the word’s meaning. In Flickr, “lazy” gives you pictures of sleeping cats, dogs, and, weirdly, some line-art of a face. Over at Google Images, however, “lazy” produces a shot of Homer Simpson crashed out on a couch, some polar bears — but also the perennial sleeping cats, which seems to be the Jungian archetype for laziness. I’ve often spent several minutes paging through the results of a particular search, fascinated by the various things people think a word “looks like”.

Now Grant Robinson has reversed these propositions in a great little online game called Guess the google. It pumps a word into Google Images, gathers 20 pictures from the results, presents these you in a 5-by-4 grid — and you have to guess what was the original word. It’s time-limited, so the faster you guess the higher your score is.

Robinson’s a brilliant designer. While you’re at his site, check out his iteration of John Conway’s Game of Life — one of the prettiest versions I’ve ever seen!