Picsearch

Infobox_Company | company_name = Picsearch
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = Stockholm, Sweden (2000)
location_city = Stockholm
location_country = Sweden
industry = Search Engine, Streaming Video
products = Image Search, Video Search, Audio Search, Video Sharing Platform
company_slogan = Innovating image search
homepage = [http://www.picsearch.com/ www.picsearch.com]

Picsearch is a Swedish company which develops and provides image search, video search and audio search services for large websites. The image search services developed and provided by Picsearch power several major internet companies, such as Ask [ [http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050304-085809/ Ask Jeeves Improves Relevancy With Image Search, "SearchEngineWatch"] . March 4, 2005. Retrieved on July 10, 2007.] and Lycos [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/picsearch-enters-alliance-with-lycos-inc-/ Picsearch enters alliance with Lycos, Inc., "Picsearch"] . May 2, 2005. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] . Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/web-de-chooses-picsearch-to-power-image-search/ WEB.DE chooses Picsearch to power image search. "Picsearch"] . November 9, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] Turkey [ [http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=75531&mailtofriend=1 Turkish portal joins hands with Picsearch. "Turkish Daily News"] . June 11, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] and an Arabic language portal. [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/maktoob-chooses-picsearch-to-power-image-search/ Maktoob chooses Picsearch to power image search. "Picsearch"] . January 17, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] Customers outside the sphere of search portals include telecoms, entertainment sites, e-commerce, [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/1-7-billion-images-on-price-comparison-site/ 1.7 Billion Images on Price Comparison Site. "Picsearch"] . June 29 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] sport websites, yellow pages and communities. [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/picsearch-provides-image-search-to-community-powered-search-engines-swickis/ Picsearch provides image search to community-powered search engines - Swickis. "Picsearch"] . June 13, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.]

Picsearch also develops and provides a white label video sharing platform (video streaming service) which is used for video communities, vlogging (video blog), video reviews on e-commerce sites, corporate video presentations, news videos and virtual showings on real estate portals [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/picsearch-powers-video-for-europes-largest-real-estate-company/ Picsearch powers video for Europes largest real estate company. "Picsearch"] . November 26 2007. Retrieved on December 3, 2007.] . Picsearch video streaming service includes flash player, upload, transcoding, hosting and streaming. Some features of the service are flexible quality (bitrate, resolution, codec), user interaction (action buttons, ad support, rating etc) and branding possibilities (logotype, off-site embedding, player branding, mobile support etc). [ [http://it24.idg.se/2.2275/1.133440 Tysk miljonaffär till svenska Picsearch. "IDG"] . November 28 2007. Retrieved on December 3, 2007.] [ [http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=678&a=719491 Bostäder visas med webbteve. "Dagens Nyheter"] . November 28 2007. Retrieved on December 3, 2007.]

History

Picsearch was developed and founded 1999-2000 at Linköping University by two engineering students Nils Andersson and Robert Risberg who were working on their Master of Science in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. Their goal was to improve relevancy, create a larger index, and to introduce family-friendly and spam filtered results. The company was launched in 2000, and the first public version of the image search engine was available in September 2001, around the same time that Google launched its services. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20020328220652/www.picsearch.com/ Picsearch Image Search. "Internet Archive WaybackMachine "] . September 23, 2001. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20010721221641/http://images.google.com/ Google Image Search Beta. "Internet Archive WaybackMachine "] . June 16, 2001. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] Ditto.com was the first public image search engine; today it is a licensing partner of Picsearch. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20000301121918/http://www.ditto.com/ Ditto Image Search. "Internet Archive WaybackMachine "] . March 1, 2000. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.]

Features

The Picsearch service is slightly more expensive than Google and Yahoo, but according to many of its licensing partners, provides a higher relevance [ [http://www.itsweden.com/main.aspx?id=13&type=features&pageid=848 Swedish Companies Show There's More to Search Engines Than Meets the Eye. "IT Sweden"] . June 2, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/picsearch-provides-image-search-to-community-powered-search-engines-swickis/ Picsearch provides image search to community-powered search engines - Swickis. "Picsearch"] . June 13, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://altsearchengines.com/2007/06/20/getting-hitched-twerq-and-picsearch/ Getting hitched - TWERQ and Picsearch. "AltSearchEngine"] . June 20, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/swedish-image-search-engine-powers-canadian-twerq/ Swedish image search engine powers Canadian Twerq. "Picsearch"] . June 20, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] and better family-friendliness [ [http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=75531&mailtofriend=1 Turkish portal joins hands with Picsearch. "Turkish Daily News"] . June 11, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/the-leading-turkish-portal-launches-multimedia-search-using-picsearch/ The leading Turkish portal launches multimedia search using Picsearch. "Picsearch"] . June 5, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/maktoob-chooses-picsearch-to-power-image-search/ Maktoob chooses Picsearch to power image search. "Picsearch"] . January 17, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/ilse-chooses-picsearch-to-power-image-search/ ilse chooses Picsearch to power image search. "Picsearch"] . October 31, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] .

Coverage

Picsearch is notable for providing one of the largest searchable indexes, providing over 2 billion images. This compares with Google (2.2 billion images) and Yahoo (1.6 billion images). [ [http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050809-200323/ Google Posts New Total Size Number for Google Images. "SearchEngineWatch"] . August 9 2005. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.]

Family-Friendliness

Family-friendliness implies that all sexual nudity, pornography and violence is removed by an automatic filter. Picsearch also offers an image removal service for those wanting their images removed.

Localization

Picsearch services include localization features to tailor the search service to regional markets. [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/czech-republics-most-popular-site-launches-image-search-using-picsearch/ Czech Republic's most popular site launches image search using Picsearch. "Picsearch"] . April 26, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/eniro-chooses-picsearch-to-power-image-search/ Eniro chooses Picsearch to power image search. "Picsearch"] . October 3, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.]

Language Support

Picsearch currently supports the following languages: Latin alphabet, Chinese characters, Cyrillic alphabet, Arabic alphabet, Indic scripts (Brahmic family), Hangul, Greek alphabet and Hebrew Alphabet.

Environmental policy

On the 22nd of March 2007, Picsearch implemented a new environmental policy [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/the-worlds-first-carbon-free-search-engine/ The world’s first carbon free search engine, "Picsearch"] . March 22, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] making them the first carbon neutral search engine in the world [ [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1593558.ece Not so cool, "The Times"] . March 31, 2007, Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] . The Picsearch initiative was followed by promises from Yahoo in April and Google in June to go carbon neutral by the end of 2007 [ [http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/19/business/google.php?page=1 Google jumps into green arena, "International Herald Tribune"] . June 19, 2007, Retrieved on July 11, 2007.] .
The policy consists of four steps:
# Picsearch plants 1000 new trees for every gigawatt-hour consumed.
# Picsearch buys and holds in trust convert|2|acre|m2 of old growth forest for every gigawatt-hour consumed.
# Picsearch only uses electricity that is carbon free and follows the highest standard of production.
# Picsearch buys carbon credits equivalent to all the energy that Picsearch consumes. [ [http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/the-worlds-first-carbon-free-search-engine/ The world’s first search engine, "Picsearch"] . March 22, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.]

Censoring child pornography

In July 2007 the Swedish National Criminal Police started working with Picsearch to incorporate a special filter, which will block the visibility of 4000 websites with commercial child pornography. Introducing the filter on Picsearch and other search services, the police authorities are trying to make it more difficult for users to find child pornography. [ [http://www.thelocal.se/7873/20070712/ Police turn to web search in child porn fight. "The Local"] . June 12, 2007. Retrieved on July 16, 2007.] [ [http://www.polisen.se/inter/util%5Cnodeid=21434&pageversion=1.jsp?articleid=9581108 Sökmotor hjälper Polisen spärra internetsidor. "Swedish National Criminal Police"] . June 12, 2007. Retrieved on July 16, 2007.] The initiative has sparked some discussion in Sweden and Japan as to whether or not the police authorities are extending their powers, whether the filter threatens freedom of speech, and whether the real reason for introducing the filter is to establish a precedent for denying access to other information as well. [ [http://www.technorati.com/search/picsearch Blogging about Picsearch. "Technorati"] . June 12-15, 2007. Retrieved on July 16, 2007.]

Development and patents

Picsearch has developed all of its search service in-house, including spidering of the Web, indexing of image, video, and audio files, and an efficient way of distributing the results to users from all parts of the world. Picsearch’s algorithms are patented in Sweden and patent-pending in the EU and the United States. [cite web | url = http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=picsearch&OS=picsearch&RS=picsearch | title = US2006190445 Indexing of Digitized Entities | publisher = US Patent & Trademark Office | date = 2006-04-10 |accessdate = 2007-07-11] [cite web | url = http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US2006190445&F=0&CY=se&LG=en | title = US2006190445 Indexing of Digitized Entities | publisher = European Patent Office | date = 2006-08-24 | accessdate = 2007-07-11]

References

External links

* [http://www.picsearch.com Official Homepage]
* [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3586/ Image Search Firefox Add-on]