AltaVista photo search capability...
John
A Closer Look
Get the Picture?
A picture is worth a thousand words. Being able to locate one picture out
of millions on the Internet may be even more valuable.
Search engines on the Web are the definitive source when you need a
computer to scour through millions of documents. They deploy robot
programs to pour over the text in a document to pluck out particular
words or phrases that meet your requests. But sending a robot program to
dig through photos is a bit trickier.
Earlier this month, though, Compaq Computer Corp.'s AltaVista search
engine added a feature that lets you do just that. The feature, called AV
Photo Finder (image.altavista.com/cgi-bin/avncgi), allows you to search
over 11 million distinct images from the Web.
It works just like a traditional search engine: You type a word or phrase in
a box and wait for the results. It's amazingly speedy: Type in "space
shuttle" and it instantly offers 14,546 pictures. The pictures are displayed in
small boxes, 12 at a time, and you can click on any of them to enlarge the
photo.
The photo search, developed with help from Virage Inc., San Mateo,
Calif., is even smarter than a traditional search engine. The robot program
searches for images on Web pages, and then reads the text surrounding
these images to try to determine the context.
Part of the accuracy is due to a partnership with Corbis Corp., a
digital-image company owned by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates.
AltaVista's search often begins with the 500,000 images in the Corbis
collection, which are cataloged into precise categories. This means you are
likely to get several screens full of Corbis pictures before you see those
from 11 million other images on the Web at large.
One quirky feature: the "visually similar" option, which analyzes the visual
characteristics of a photo and looks for similar images. Computers, though,
don't always see things as humans do. Ask for photos similar to a close-up
shot of a glamorous, smiling Marilyn Monroe, for example, and you get a
shot of a Howdy Doody album cover. Go figure.
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