by Jonathan Marshall Today there are major search engines that offer advanced search options based on image, this allows users to filter searches by size, colorization, and file type. Even with this evolution of search technology, there are still limiting issues. According to Julie Batten from ClickZ, until recently, most search engines had focused on alt tags and context surrounding images to categorize and index those images. A user would type in a text query, and the search engine would rank the images based almost exclusively on their relevancy to the keywords contained in the image's alt text, surrounding body copy, and page metadata. Unfortunately, this has made image search the target of spammers undertaking keyword stuffing or similar black-hat SEO techniques. Batten goes on to talk about image search in her blow below.

New technologies are emerging that will take image search a step further, however. Instead of looking at the text associated with an image, these technologies can effectively scan and "see" what the image is to provide the user with information about it. The applications of such technology are far reaching, including copyright protection, content moderation, censorship, and forensics investigations. Today, I'll focus on its application to search specifically. Terms used to describe these advances include "visual search technologies," "visual cataloguing," "image recognition," "image identification," and "visual content analysis." No matter what you call them, though, these technologies essentially attempt to do the same thing: decipher the content in an image so that queries can be performed. Why should you care about all this? I'm sure you've experienced one of the following scenarios: * When you go through your photos from the previous night, you find a picture with a random person in it. You want to find out who that person is In addition, depending on the visual search technology, it is possible to weight queries to emphasize a specific color, shape, or both.

Any advertiser whose products rely on images to do the selling (e.g., fashion retailers and car manufacturers) stand to benefit from increased visibility, literally, in search engines. You may see more traffic coming to your Web site as a result of the images your site has indexed in these new image search engines. It is unclear just how much impact these new technologies will have on individuals and businesses, but it is an important trend to be aware of for all those who use search engine marketing strategies.