The New York Times reports that "Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages." The algorithm, dubbed VisualRank, weighs and ranks images that look most similar.
I think its a great idea, to rank images based on it pagerank would be nice. Sometimes I get some really random images when I'm looking for something specific.
According to the New York Times yesterday, visual rank is an algorithm “for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar,” and in Google’s internal scoring tests it achieved far higher quality results.
If I understand the gist of the research paper [PDF] right, then it seems the core of Google’s VisualRank algo consists of not only looking at textual cues in regards to images, but also image content itself. After identifying the most authoritative set of picture candidates for a given query, Google then improves the ranking of images found to be sharing the most visual characteristics with the group at large, by creating a similarity network (which also would understand e.g. imagery shown from different perspectives, to a certain extent). Center node images or those images containing large resolution versions would then determined to be the most relevant. In 1000 sample queries – taken from the top Google Product search queries – 762 VisualRank results were tested to be more relevant than Google’s old approach, with 202 equal quality results and only 70 results that were worse.
It really is a great piece of news. But I wonder how Google is going to continue developing the program. For instance, if they were a stock photography company, that would seem natural since they wanted to give ranks to photos according to the artistic values and the quality of the, let's wait and see the rest of the news.
another google tool
Linear Mode
