Google cooking up its VisualRank

In order to avoid a bundle of unwanted images following a search query, Google is diligently working on providing their new VisualRank tool, which is still under research but soon to be brought live.

Very similar to the PageRank tool, the VisualRank will filter images so that only those ‘highly ranked’ will appear given the related search keyword. For example, if you enter Nike as your specific image search query, the result will be the one seen below which at first glance you notice contains only Nike products, however, it is quite inconsistent. You’ve got shoes, Nike logos, some Nike related cartoons, Nike+Ipod, etc. But it might not be giving you exactly what it is your looking for.

Research efforts remain somewhat complicated since computer technology does not make matters any easier for Google. During the developing process and trials being run for VisualRank, Google has focused on the 2,000 most popular product queries, this allowing them to later define the top ten images to be set as default as first options offered to users. The reason behind targeting product queries is because they are ‘popular in actual usage’ and users know what to expect when entries of this sort are submitted.

As Google continues to perform studies and further research to perfect this new tool, their objective is to continue ‘first, estimating similarity measures for all of the images on the web is computationally expensive; approximations or alternative computations are needed. Second, we hope to evaluate our approach with respect to the large number of recently proposed alternative clustering methods. Third, many variations of PageRank can be used in quite interesting ways for image search.’

In the meantime, let’s wait and see what Google comes up with, although they have stated it won’t be out anytime soon, I’m sure we can be patient.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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