Image Searching

Introduction




Search is a ubiquitous activity. Industry analysts believe that search is the gateway for many Internet activities. For example, when you purchase an item online, you often begin with a search for the best price. You also search to compare different model’s pros and cons.

Amazon is a business built on search. You search for books by genre. Amazon has a feature that suggests books that you might find interesting. This is based on two search types - your previous purchase history, and the search histories of others whom have purchased the book you are considering to purchase.

GoogleNews allows you to search for news, and to create filters to automatically retrieve specific news stories for you. For example, if you want stories relating to your favorite sports team, particular city, industry, etc., create a filter with the name of the team, city, or industry and Google will return related stories.

Search is still in its infancy. There are no good methods for music searches. For example, I know the melody of a song, but I don’t know the name. How can I input the melody?

How do we search for non-text related information? Image searching is probably the second most popular type of search next to traditional text-based search. How can I search my hard drive or the Web for all images that contain a blue shirt, or every image that contains buildings made of brick?

The remainder of this article discusses three interesting approaches:

• the Picassa 2 product from Google
  


• tagging (using Flickr), and
  


• A9 from Amazon
  

Picasa2




What better place to start than at Google. Picasa2 (from Google) provides image search capabilities, the ability to quickly insert an image into a blog, email images, print images and so on. It also contains elementary functions to manipulate images. It is available free of charge for Windows and Linux-based systems (picasa.google.com).

Picasa2 begins by indexing all the images on your hard drive. You can initially search by file name.