Does Google consider the URL of an image?

We have a question from Paul Randall from England.

Paul asks, Does Google take into account the URL of an image when searching?

For example, could domain.Com cat lolcats M JPEG appear in a Google search for LOLcats?

This is a question that I've answered before, but it's worth answering again.

Images are hard, right?

If you type in Daffodil, you want to get pictures of Daffodils, but people don't put the text Daffodil right in the image where you could OCR it or something like that.

So you have to look at other information around.

You have to look in the metadata for an image, you have to look in the surrounding text.

And I think it's entirely fair for us to look at the URL as well.

Now I wouldn't try to optimize for Google image search by putting domain.Com cat cat, locate slow cats and just repeating the same text over and over and over again because we try to make sure that we do reasonable things and that just trying to spam doesn't necessarily work.

But I do think it's fair for us to use all kinds of information that we can to try to say yes, this image is relevant.

This would be a good image to return when the user types in something.