Picsearch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Picsearch | |
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| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | Stockholm, Sweden (2000) |
| Headquarters | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Industry | Search Engine |
| Slogan | Innovating image search |
| Website | www.picsearch.com |
Picsearch is a Swedish company that develops and provides visual search services, both for their own site picsearch.com (and other Picsearch properties) – their own search engine for pictures, and for license customers. Picsearch is one of the world’s three biggest providers of search services for images, their main competitors being Google and Yahoo. The image search services developed and provided by Picsearch power several leading internet properties, such as MSN Search, Ask and Lycos amongst others.
Picsearch now provides searching more than 1,700,000,000 pictures on the web and through their syndication partners their technology reaches millions of users all over the world.
The search services of Picsearch are based on three principles to create a competitive edge, and these are relevancy, family friendliness, and user friendliness. Picsearch supports searches of all languages that uses the largest written languages, including the Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, Arabic and Hebrew scripts, and Chinese characters.
Specialized search engines, like in the fields of image search, are among the fastest growing search services on the internet. In 2005 alone the number of image searches increased by 91% (Nielsen/NetRatings 2006-03-31).
Picsearch is the world's first carbon free search engine.
The company works for preventing child prostitution and supports ECPAT.
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[edit] History
Picsearch started out as an idea by two students at Linköping University, Sweden. Normal text search, all that was available at that time, was inadequate to find relevant information on the internet, they thought, since lots of information on the net is visual. There ought to be a way to easy search this information. They developed a new technology, and new algorithms (patent-pending), in order to index images and handle large amounts of data. And they created a large scale image search engine.
The company was founded in 2000, and is based in Stockholm, Sweden. The first public version of the image search engine was launched in the summer of 2001, and soon grew popular among internet users.
[edit] Features
Using Picsearch’s own technology, users can search the Web for images and the results are received as a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy. When the user clicks on a thumbnail he/she is linked to the original web site where that image is located. Through the advanced search the user can adjust the search criteria to fit their own needs choosing to search images, animations, color, black&white, and setting preferences on image size in pixels.
On their own web sites Picsearch provides the following interface languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Slovene, Swedish and Danish. However Picsearch supports searches of all languages that uses all the largest written languages, including all Western-languages using the Latin alphabet, Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet, languages using Arabic and Hebrew scripts, and since March, 2006 Picsearch has full support for Chinese characters which means that Picsearch can provide relevant results for searches made in Chinese and Japanese.
[edit] Principles
Picsearch’s image search technology is based on three principles, which adds to the competitiveness of the company. The first one being relevancy using their own patent-pending algorithms to strive for users obtaining the most relevant search results first. The second one is family friendliness, the indexed images pass through advanced filters to eliminate offensive material. And the third is user friendliness, believing in simplicity, speed and accuracy.
The family filters were planned for from the outset and integrated into Picsearch's whole indexing system. Offensive content is eliminated by the specially designed filters before it can even enter the database. However, no filtering processes can be flawless and therefore Picsearch offers an image removal service for removing single images.
[edit] Licensing
Picsearch offers its visual search services to search engines and portals to enable them to complete their own search package. By enhancing the service that they can offer to their users, Picsearch's syndication partners benefit from increased user-traffic and hence higher revenue.
In addition to image search, Picsearch also develops and markets video search. Aiming at portals and search engines focusing on the user experience, but also specialized sites for shopping, entertainment, travel, news, education, etc. with this service.
As of June, 2006 Picsearch was the first company to integrate image search service into a price comparison site, smarto.se. A user searching for a certain product can now also find pictures of that product through the Picsearch search technology.
[edit] Trivia
Ditto, the first image search service on the internet (however small scale) is now licensing Picsearch.
[edit] Alternatives
A few alternatives for content-based image retrieval are also available, for example, the server-side imgSeek project.
