Searching images is a difficult problem, and it’s not a feature offered by many commercial search engines. Some will cheat slightly, by indexing the title or filename of the image, or the text surrounding an image embedded on a page, and call this ‘image search’ – but this method doesn’t work very well, especially when you have a standalone image called ‘IMG0000064.jpg’ which is actually a picture of an apple. We’ve seen some good demos of actual image search – Imense is particularly impressive – but none that promise a generic solution that will work with all images.
In the meantime we’ve been developing some image related search technology for one of our clients, and we can now offer image similarity matching as part of Flax – you can read more about this exciting development on the Searching with Xapian blog, written by my colleague Richard Boulton.
