Picsearch was a Swedish company which developed and provided image search services for large websites. The image search services developed by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as Lycos.Picsearch enters alliance with Lycos, Inc., Picsearch. May 2, 2005. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany,WEB.DE chooses Picsearch to power image search. Picsearch. November 9, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. TurkeyTurkish portal joins hands with Picsearch. Turkish Daily News. June 11, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. and an Arabic language portal.Maktoob chooses Picsearch to power image search. Picsearch. January 17, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. Customers outside the sphere of search portals included telecoms, entertainment sites, e-commerce,1.7 Billion Images on Price Comparison Site. Picsearch. June 29, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. sport websites, yellow pages and communities.Picsearch provides image search to community-powered search engines - Swickis. Picsearch. June 13, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. In January 2022, the official website was changed to declare "We had a great ride. R.I.P. Picsearch 2000 - 2022" and its usual service pages went dark.
Picsearch also developed an Online Video Platform under the brand name Screen9 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.Picsearch powers video for Europes largest real estate company. Picsearch. November 26, 2007. Retrieved on December 3, 2007. Screen9 continues to be in business. The 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.).Tysk miljonaffär till svenska Picsearch. IDG. November 28, 2007. Retrieved on December 3, 2007.Bostäder visas med webbteve. Dagens Nyheter. November 28, 2007. Retrieved on December 3, 2007.
History Picsearch was developed and founded in the year, 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.Picsearch Image Search. Internet Archive WaybackMachine . September 23, 2001. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.Google Image Search Beta. Internet Archive WaybackMachine . June 16, 2001. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. Ditto.com was the first public image search engine.Ditto Image Search. Internet Archive WaybackMachine . March 1, 2000. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.
Features
The Picsearch service was slightly more expensive than Google and Yahoo, but according to many of its licensing partners, provided a higher relevanceSwedish Companies Show There's More to Search Engines Than Meets the Eye. IT Sweden. June 2, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.Getting hitched - TWERQ and Picsearch. AltSearchEngine. June 20, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.Swedish image search engine powers Canadian Twerq. Picsearch. June 20, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007. and better family-friendliness.The leading Turkish portal launches multimedia search using Picsearch. Picsearch. June 5, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.ilse chooses Picsearch to power image search. Picsearch. October 31, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.
Coverage Picsearch was notable for providing one of the largest searchable indexes, providing over 3 billion images in 2017. This compares with Google (2.2 billion images) and Yahoo (1.6 billion images).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 was removed by an automatic filter. Picsearch also offered an image removal service for those wanting their images removed.
Localization Picsearch services included localization features to tailor the search service to regional markets.Czech Republic's most popular site launches image search using Picsearch. Picsearch. April 26, 2007. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.Eniro chooses Picsearch to power image search. Picsearch. October 3, 2006. Retrieved on July 11, 2007.
Language Support
Picsearch supported the following languages: Latin alphabet, Chinese characters, Cyrillic script, Arabic alphabet, Brahmic scripts, Hangul, Greek alphabet and Hebrew Alphabet.
Environmental policy On the 22nd of March 2007, Picsearch implemented a new environmental policyThe 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.. 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.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 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.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.Police turn to web search in child porn fight. The Local. June 12, 2007. Retrieved on July 16, 2007.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.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.
References
External links End user image search portal Image Search Firefox, Chrome, Opera Add-on