1. An online search system that services both a plurality of web hosting servers and a plurality of user computing devices via an Internet, the online search system comprising: a processing infrastructure of a server computer that interacts with each of the plurality of web hosting servers via the Internet in a web crawl process to gather a plurality of images, the processing infrastructure associates, during the web crawl process, each of the plurality of images with at least one of a plurality of image groups, a first group of the plurality of image groups being associated with a plurality of first images of the plurality of images, each of the plurality of image groups being associated with at least one image characteristic; a communication interface through which an uploaded search image is received by the processing infrastructure; and the processing infrastructure, based on a first group selection from the plurality of image groups, performs a search associated with the first group selection to generate search results that identify only a portion of the plurality of first images.