Angelina Jolie: Stuck in timewarp on visual search

Emily Riley | June 28, 2006, 04:18 PM

Welcome Sapna, guest blogger from the left coast.

Briefings are a fun part of my work here, and I thought it would be interesting to voice my thoughts via Emily’s blog. Here is an update on one of them.

Pixsy: The visual search engine scours RSS feeds for images and graphics and provides them on the results page with ‘pop-out’ windows containing info. I played around with it a bit, testing both celebrity searches (‘Angelina Jolie’ which turned up a large number of very similar looking pictures from the same source. Hmm, I expected more on her recent Namibia news or the Anderson Cooper interview maybe?) and searches on latest news (ahem, ‘World Cup’.) The ‘world cup’ search resulted in fairly relevant results…well, and a photo of the 1999 cricket ‘world cup’ but that’s ok. Football isn’t the only sport with such a prize.
Chase Nortin, who swung by our office last week cited Nielsen info that indicated image search was growing, and in a big way. I found this article on that. I can see how image search is important, and I like it that Pixsy white-labels their image-search so that a hollywood.com can power its image search via Pixsy. The site currently seems to have Google ads and there are category-based listings as well. It would be interesting to see who are the other players in the visual-search market, I know Riya has been getting some great PR since its ‘Demo’ event session. Perhaps Blinkx fits into this space a bit, though both these companies seem slightly different in their business model. Riya focuses more on face-recognition within photos while Blinkx focuses on video-search. Pixsy would gather some interest in the news-sites circle as well, I expect. The RSS-sourcing may or may not be the best part of the site, would love to see how they move ahead from here.


Pixsy seemed to have been gathering some PR in the last couple of months, and will be rolling out updates and news in the next few months. Its fun to think about the evolving areas of search, will keep you posted on briefings in this area. On a lighter note, I love the sheer innovativeness (although I admit, its pretty funny, too) of this idea. Especially because the ideas suggested are SEO consultant ideas, just cloaked for audience understanding, i.e. “Google doesn’t like Flash” Vs. “removal of unnecessary objects to allow free flow of energy.” Ha!