Ask Jeeves Launches Proprietary Image Search Technology And no sooner does Yahoo! “capitulate” on search then Ask Jeeves redoubles their efforts (at least in one area) in Image Search. Ask Jeeves announced today the launch of its first proprietary image search technology. You can try it out here.
I do feel that Ask Jeeves is better than Yahoo and Google Image Search but not better than Flickr. Flickr still has (in my opinion) the best image rank out there.
Want another idea for image search? Tap the photoblogging market. You could do this a couple of ways. The first way is to work with Brandon Stone who runs the excellent photoblogs.org. Brandon’s site currently boasts a directory of 14,932 photoblogs. People vote on them and Brandon’s got a rank. For your image search, continue to use your spider but amplify exponentially all search results from top photoblogs generally and the higher the ranking the more rank juice you give it.
Photobloggers are oftentimes professionals or talented amateurs and produce stunning images. Why not serve their great work up, it’s win win, you get better stronger images and they get more search traffic.
Ask Jeeves, at least, could also consider mining Bloglines. Which photoblogs have the most subscribers at Bloglines? Lots of Bloglines subscriptions? Bump their rank up in image search.
Of course you have to be careful, because lots of photobloggers might not want the extra search traffic (expensive bandwidth cost to serve up high res photos), but you could always allow those photoblogs the ability to opt out if so desired.
Thanks, Alexander!