Visual Search Engines

An Overview of Search Engines

A brief overview of search engines in general will help people understand visual search engines. Search engines are programs used to search the World Wide Web for information based on specified keywords and return a list of search results where relevant keywords are found. The first search engine, Archie, started on September 11, 1990, by an MBA student named Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The popular search engine Google was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a garage in Menlo Park, California, in 1996.

Common terms that help people better understand search engines include the following: (a) keyword, (b) search engine result pages (SERPs), (c) search engine optimization, and (d) spider. A keyword is a word used by a search engine in a search to find relevant documents, which can be webpages, PDF files, images, or other Internet-based resources. SERP refers to the web-page that a search engine returns with the results of its search. Search engine optimization refers to the accessibility of webpages to search engines and ways that boost their chances to be found in a search. A spider, also called a Web crawler, is a program that automatically fetches webpages and is used to feed pages to search engines.

Typically, search engines such as Google work in three major steps: (1) sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible; (2) creating an index based on words contained in each document through a program called an indexer; and (3) providing meaningful results by sifting through millions of pages recorded in the index and calculating relevancy to match each search through search engine software. Every search engine has [Page 830]its own algorithms or formula to determine its results and the ordering of the sites it lists in its results.

Visual Search Engines: Function and Evaluation

Visual search engines generally fall into two categories: (1) tools visually representing search results and (2) tools searching images based on visual characteristics. A visual search engine (especially those of the first category) is similar to a traditional text search engine and allows users to search via a keyword, returning results related to that keyword. The difference is that visual search engines return image links instead of text links as text search engines would. Visual search engines are mostly Web-based programs, and they are more interactive than text search engines. A multimedia plug-in is usually needed to operate interactive visual search engines, but the plug-in is generally free and easy to install. Those that do not need plug-ins are usually less interactive.

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