New feature!

You can now search in Behold using both the regular metadata a la traditional image search engines like Yahoo and the automatic image annotations. Here's how it works: you enter a text query into the traditional text search: box and then pick one or more keywords from the visual vocabulary to refine your search in refine with image analysis:. A few encouraging examples:

#1. Search for beach using only metadata:

then refine with the visual keyword beach:


#2. Search for bus using only metadata:

refine with the visual keyword car:


This can be useful when you want only a certain type of pictures from a given location, e.g. london buldings or parisian towers. It can also be helpful when metadata for a particular word is poor and you would like to filter your results, e.g. metadata lake vs. combined lake and metadata car vs. combined car.

Essentially this new feature lets you see how automatically assigning annotations to images based on their contents can improve standard text-based image search on the web.

Give it a go!

And while we are at it here's a link to a short report outlining how Behold indexes images and summarising the search engine's current features.