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Google Announces Software for VisualRank, Precision Image Search

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.

WebmasterWorld members fear that this could be a problem for spammers -- just like folks aim to build links for PageRank, so too this may happen in the image arena.

However, it may build traffic to images too, which some individuals are hoping for.

Perhaps this is the beginning of greater software technologies that will "index audio spoken in videos" and podcasts. Those transcription services would be super cool.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

posted Tamar Weinberg in Other Google Topics at April 29, 2008 11:06 AM Comments (6)

Comments

I think its a great idea another source for surfers to find what they want quick. A picture, image is worth a thousand words.

 

Hi,

I think that this should have been available for some time now.
For me it's a good thing since I don't know HTML and all that ALT descriptions for images it's not for me.
And it will be great when one wants to know who's the author of an image. It will improeve the search quality alot.

 

another way to make domination on search engine market, i think. it's look simple way to SEO. so, if they do, really web content does matter again?

 

Riya's Like.com and their software application have already been doing the job quite well.
http://www.like.com
http://www.riya.com

 

One thing i love about Google is their innovativeness but i hope this image ranking will not influence the page ranking substantively!

 

the one thing about Google is it is the lack of information you have to work with

 

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