Searching images and video
Although searching text-based material requires some clever programming to be really efficient, at least the basic material is just the text itself. Searching graphics is an entirely different ball game. Given a lot of photos, for example, how does a computer determine which pictures contain apples? If the titles all contain the word “apple” that is one thing. But suppose the title says, “A nice snack”, or “Eat one of these every day for health”. Or suppose the picture has nothing to do with apples but is a photo of somebody’s darling child and is called, “The apple of my eye”. And then there is the problem of screening offensive or pornographic images. While we easily recognize an apple when we see it, a computer is far less adept at pattern-recognition so scanning the image itself is not a very efficient way to search. This means that creating search algorithms for images is complicated by the need for at least some human indexing.
Nonetheless, Google and others have had search facilities for images for some time and now that video is being posted in increasing quantities (e.g., YouTube) there are also ways to search for your favorite clip. Of course, Google has a site but there are other search engines as well. SearchEngineWatch lists and discusses some of the ways that you can search for videos.
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