I’ve been meaning to look into how the image search engine Pixsy actually works, as it’s been getting a lot of attention. I poked around on their site and couldn’t find any explanation of their methods, but from trying out some searches, it doesn’t appear that they are doing any actual image processing, just doing text processing for text and tags in proiximity to images they are indexing.
This theory is supported by my discovery that the top 5 out of 12 image results on the query term “ufo” are pictures of quilts. Which absolutely cracks me up in how right, and yet wrong, they are.
Interestingly, the first 500 images returned in Google’s image search contain many weird things, but no craft-project pictures. I am undecided about whether this makes me like Google search more or less.
Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek