Picsearch was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

company which developed and provided

image search An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captio ...

services for large websites. The

services developed by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as

Lycos Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...

. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, 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, 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 An online video platform (OVP), provided by a video hosting service, enables users to upload, convert, store and play back video content on the Internet, often via a structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally u ...

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. 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.).

History

Picsearch was developed and founded in the year, 1999–2000, at

Linköping University Linköping University (, LiU) is a public research university based in Linköping, Sweden. Originally established in 1969, it was granted full university status in 1975 and is one of Sweden's largest academic institutions. The university has fou ...

by two engineering students Nils Andersson and Robert Risberg, who were working on their

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

Applied Physics Applied physics is the application of physics to solve scientific or engineering problems. It is usually considered to be a bridge or a connection between physics and engineering. "Applied" is distinguished from "pure" by a subtle combination ...

and

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

. Their goal was to improve relevancy, create a larger index, and to introduce

family-friendly A family-friendly product or service is one that is considered to be suitable for all members of an average family. Family-friendly restaurants are ones that provide service to families that have young children. Frequently, family-friendly produc ...

and

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

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 Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

launched its services. Ditto.com was the first public image search engine.

Features

The Picsearch service was slightly more expensive than Google and Yahoo, but according to many of its licensing partners, provides a higher

relevance Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sci ...

and better

family-friendliness A family-friendly product or service is one that is considered to be suitable for all members of an average family. Family-friendly restaurants are ones that provide service to families that have young children. Frequently, family-friendly produc ...

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).

Family-Friendliness

Family-friendliness implies that all sexual nudity,

pornography Pornography (often shortened to porn or porno) is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. Primarily intended for adults,

and

violence Violence is the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Other definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or Power (social and p ...

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.

Language Support

Picsearch supported the following languages:

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...

, Arabic alphabet,

Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

and

Hebrew Alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, wikt:אלפבית, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew languag ...

Environmental policy

On the 22nd of March 2007, Picsearch implemented a new environmental policy making them the first carbon neutral search engine in the world. The Picsearch initiative was followed by promises from Yahoo in April and Google in June to go carbon neutral by the end of 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.

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 Child pornography (also called CP, child sexual abuse material, CSAM, child porn, or kiddie porn) is pornography that unlawfully exploits children for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a chi ...

. 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. The initiative has sparked some discussion in

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

as to whether or not the police authorities are extending their powers, whether the filter threatens

freedom of speech Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recogni ...

, and whether the real reason for introducing the filter is to establish a precedent for denying access to other information as well.

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

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External links

End user image search portalImage Search Firefox, Chrome, Opera Add-on
Image search Internet search engines