To Search for Images on the Web, Look at the Text, Then Look at the Images

The World Wide Web can be viewed many different ways. It is simultaneously a giant library, a world-encompassing read-mostly file system, a novel means of expression, and an incredible business opportunity. In addition, the Web is probably the largest public repository of images ever created. Images are particularly important to the Web because it was their introduction into HTML by the developers of NCSA Mosaic that created the explosion of interest in the Web in 1993 and 1994. While the popular saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is not uniformly correct, it is definitely true that people find certain pictures far more compelling and informative than any text addressing the same topic. So, it is natural that we should want to use the Web as a sort of “image library” that we can search for images relevant to topics that interest us...

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