Ask Jeeves Launches New Image Search Engine
Ask Jeeves is expanding its internal search offerings by launching its first proprietary image search technology, available on Ask Jeeves at pictures.ask.com. Ask Picture Search is the engine’s first internally-created index of images with new & innovative image search ranking algorithms. Image Search accounts for 16% of all searches on Ask Jeeves.
“Image search is the second-leading type of search on Ask Jeeves after Web search. The improvements we are introducing today move the needle for searchers where they really need it,” said Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Ask Jeeves’ new Image Search includes improved ranking algorithms, patent-pending image recognition technologies and, for the first time, Ask’s own image index.
Ask says that The image search technology utilizes Ask Jeeves’ unique algorithmic search ranking, which clusters the Web into topic areas and determines the authoritativeness of pages and images among their topic community. This approach requires additional computations beyond that of other ranking methodologies that simply evaluate the popularity of pages and images on the Web at large. Ask Jeeves combines this methodology with new sophisticated image recognition technologies to further increase relevance. These patent-pending recognition technologies measure a wide variety of image attributes, such as image type, shape, brightness and contrast level to determine picture quality. The combination returns extremely relevant, high quality images for unparalleled visual relevance.
“Our new image search combines Ask Jeeves’ unique text ranking and clustering algorithms with sophisticated image recognition technologies and our new image index,” said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology for Ask Jeeves. “Our goal is to give users the best technology and tools to get the most out of the Image Web.”
Additionally, Ask Jeeves is expanding Image Smart Answers and all image search results can be saved to users’ MyJeeves personalized search by clicking the ‘save’ link under each image.
