Repoted on UK Timesonline website, Google image search is going for a major update/enhancement that will change the way Google searches images around the web and tags it.

“Google has unveiled a technology which it says will make the task of searching for images on the web far simpler and more effective.”This new technology will search and rank images. the same way Google pagerank does webpages. Till now most of the image search is doen on the web, by looking for keywords around images, mainly captions.

“By treating images as web documents and their similarities as probabilistic visual hyperlinks, we estimate the likelihood of images [being] visited by a user traversing through these visual-hyperlinks,” said Shumeet Balujaz, a Google researcher, in a paper he co-wrote with a colleague from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In a trial which compared the results for the 2,000 most popular queries on Google Images, the new algorithm was found to reduce the number of “irrelevant images” by 83 per cent in comparison with those returned by the existing Google Images search, the researchers said.

This new engine will join a number of new techniques employed to search the visual content including the new engine by Blinkx, whuch has developed an engine to search videos.