Smile: The Butler's Taking Pictures
This past week Ask Jeeves launched its first proprietary image search technology, a service which features major improvements to its image search ranking algorithms and its new "related search suggestions" feature. Jeeves has been involved with picture search since 2003 and until now the service was powered by Picsearch, a third-party provider of image search capabilities.
Jeeves' new image search technology was developed internally and uses many of the same elements that have made its main web search unique and popular. For instance, the two search types share the same algorithmic search ranking feature which clusters the web into topic areas and determines the ranking of pages within that area.
In addition, the Ask Jeeves brings new imaging search technology and know-how to the table which will assist in the measuring of specific imagery attributes such as image type, shape, brightness, and contrast level to determine picture quality.
Image search is offered by all of the major search engines, and people tend to think it's a fairly generic service, with little difference in results between any of the engines. When in fact, Image search is tricky because images lack most of the clues search engines use to find relevant text documents that match our queries. Because images are made up of patterns of bits rather than words, search engines can't directly "look" at an image and figure out what it represents.
Instead, search engines look for other clues, such as filenames, text immediately above or below an image (potential captions), the overall context of a page an image appears on, and so on.
So what separates Ask Jeeves from the likes of Google or Yahoo!? Well, Jeeves image search is doing all this, but it's also applying its Teoma ranking system to find sites that have a broad representation of images and topics. This will help to identify those sources that have the greatest degree of "authority" for a particular topic to help determine image relevance. This is truly great feature and one that should help good ol' Jeeves to stand out amongst the other image search engines.
All in all this was a great step forward for the Internet's favorite Butler. Ask Jeeves has definitely taken image search to a whole new level.
Jeeves' new image search technology was developed internally and uses many of the same elements that have made its main web search unique and popular. For instance, the two search types share the same algorithmic search ranking feature which clusters the web into topic areas and determines the ranking of pages within that area.
In addition, the Ask Jeeves brings new imaging search technology and know-how to the table which will assist in the measuring of specific imagery attributes such as image type, shape, brightness, and contrast level to determine picture quality.
Image search is offered by all of the major search engines, and people tend to think it's a fairly generic service, with little difference in results between any of the engines. When in fact, Image search is tricky because images lack most of the clues search engines use to find relevant text documents that match our queries. Because images are made up of patterns of bits rather than words, search engines can't directly "look" at an image and figure out what it represents.
Instead, search engines look for other clues, such as filenames, text immediately above or below an image (potential captions), the overall context of a page an image appears on, and so on.
So what separates Ask Jeeves from the likes of Google or Yahoo!? Well, Jeeves image search is doing all this, but it's also applying its Teoma ranking system to find sites that have a broad representation of images and topics. This will help to identify those sources that have the greatest degree of "authority" for a particular topic to help determine image relevance. This is truly great feature and one that should help good ol' Jeeves to stand out amongst the other image search engines.
All in all this was a great step forward for the Internet's favorite Butler. Ask Jeeves has definitely taken image search to a whole new level.
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posted by Karl Ribas Friday, January 27, 2006 Read Comments (0) | Post a Comment | Subscribe  
 
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