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Image search
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Or Image search engine.
Image search is a kind of search engine specialised on finding pictures, images, animations etc. Like the text search, image search is an information retrieval system designed to help find information on the Internet and it allows the user to ask for images etc. using keywords or search phrases and to receive a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy.
When clicking on a thumbnail one is linked to the original web site where that image is located. Using an advanced search option the user can typically adjust the search criteria to fit their own needs choosing to search images or animations, color or black&white, and setting preferences on image size.
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The very first image search service on the Internet was Ditto, a small scale image search. In the summer of 2001 both Picsearch and Google launched the world's first large scale image search engines. This was a revolution to the search industry. The user had previously been left with only one choice of finding information; the text search engines. Since so much information on the Internet is visual, and the human brain is designed to quickly deal with visual information, the success was given. Now, one could find relevant information in a different way.
Google at that time on its way on becoming one of the most popular text search engines, naturally had an advantage when, in the summer of 2001, launching their image search as a complement. Their users soon found the new feature and understood to value it.
In addition to their own website, Google offers their image search service to license customers such as other search engines and portals to enable them to complete their own search package. Google image search is today one of the world's largest providers of image search.
The newcomer Picsearch built their business entirely on an image search engine, striving to be the world's first large scale image search engine. Launching their image search in the summer of 2001, at the same time as Google, they soon grew popular among the users on the Internet.
In addition to their own website, Picsearch offers their image search service to license customers such as other search engines and portals to enable them to complete their own search package. Picsearch is today one of the world's largest providers of image search, and is the world's first carbon free search engine.
Many other companies followed, when Google and Picsearch offered this new tool for retrieving information on the Internet, you had to get on the train. However the time and cost for developing an own image search technlogy to compete with the existing ones are not always worth while. Some did succeed and Yahoo is today one of the world's largest providers of image search.
A common misunderstanding when it comes to image search is that the technology is based on detecting information in the image itself. But image search works as other search engines, by analysing and ranking the text information linked to the image according to different mathematical models. The text linked to the image is typically the name of the image-file, the title of and page information of the web page where the image is located, and text on the web page itself.
Information about the image is indexed and stored in a large database and when a search query is performed the image search engine looks up the index, and queries are matched with the stored information. The results are presented in order of relevancy. The usefulness of an image search engine depends on the relevance of the results it gives back, and the ranking algorithms are one of the keys to becoming a big player.