viernes, 7 de noviembre de 2008

The power of visual search

All the big search engines have an image retrieval feature, why?, because its fun to search images around the web and also because is an important business channel. If you want to buy a hat for example you could type the word hat and you will get a lot of links (webpages) where the word hat is embedded, maybe there are a lot of webpages that don't match with the type of result that you wanted, so if you want to buy a hat it will be very boring to read a lot of websites and you might change your opinion of buying a hat and you could end up buying a book something that you didn't want at the beginning, is in this scenery where the visual search comes to play an important role, why?, because you will see a lot of hats and you will click onto the image that has the hat that you are expecting to buy, if that image belongs to a website that sells hats, you will be tented to buy it, for that reason I do believe that visual search is a very powerful business channel.

The search engines with the most accurate images retrieval will be the winner in the monetization of this important feature. Google is working hard in that issue with its VisualRank [2,3].