A picture can be worth a thousand words, but an RSS feed is worth a million pictures.
Rather than focus on written words, Pixsy Corp. plans to make Web searching visual, and will shortly launch a search engine that is designed to return thousands of photographs and video images from hundreds of sites.
That is the virtual promise of Pixsy, a visual search engine that scours syndication feeds (in the format of Really Simple Syndication) for up-to-date images and then makes them searchable.
The company will re-launch its engine with a revolving repository of millions of thumbnail images, which are drawn from photos and videos on sites ranging from The New York Times to YouTube.
The search technology aggregates, extracts and organizes visual content from real simple syndication (RSS) feeds. The software identifies the image, grabs the photograph and associated metadata, and turns the content into a thumbnail. Then brings back the image to Pixsy.com where the photo is indexed and made searchable.
"Anywhere there is an RSS feed, we consume it, extract an image…and make it searchable," said Chase Norlin, founder of the San Francisco-based company.
As opposed to search giant Google, which retrieves relevant pages from billions of Web sites, Pixsy hones in on the freshest images from publishers, Norlin said. "So you can now explore the Web visually."
For example, visitors can click a New York Times logo on Pixsy to see a collection of the newspaper’s latest photos, which are then linked to news stories on the Times Web site. People can also type "George Clooney" in the search box to see photos of the Academy Award-winning actor, linked to all the latest stories about him.
Nearly one year after the site’s preview launch, new technology now relies on spiders to crawl the Web seeking RSS feeds. Content comes from blogs; news sites like Reuters and The New York Times; photo and video sharing sites, YouTube and Grouper Networks; or social networks, mySpace.com.
The timing is apt. Multimedia is an increasingly large part of a reader’s diet on the Web. Image search was the fastest-growing form of search on popular sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN in the last year, up 91 percent from February 2005 to February 2006, according to a report from researcher Nielsen/NetRatings issued recently.
Pixsy, a privately held company with four employees, officially launched its site last July. It had difficulty aggregating images, however, because the technology relied on XML feeds with a limited number of partners. The service now pulls images from hundreds of RSS feeds, according to Norlin, and that number is growing hourly, he said.
Norlin, who managed the development of Sony’s first online imaging service, said Pixsy’s business model is to drive traffic to partners, rather than host the content.
Pixsy.com is built on an Asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) platform, collects thumbnail images from an RSS feed automatically and then associate words, or metadata, with that image based on the news or information from where it came. Pixsy then uses that data to associate images with search terms.
The Pixsy visual search engine is segmented into categories, such as News, Celebrities & Entertainment, Blogs & Social Networks, People and Dating, Posters & Products, and Games. Once a search is done, the site separates the still images from the videos.
Searches are easy. And for publishers and graphic artists, the image search engine provides an alternative source other than proprietary image collections, such as Getty Images, to seek available content on the Web.
Still, publishers could grumble over use of their images, even in the form of thumbnails. Pixsy does not have partnerships with publishers from which it draws, but rather relies on the inherent marketing push of RSS feeds. Norlin said he believes that publishers will be pleased with the traffic.
Pixsy forms partnerships, revenue-sharing deals with pay-per-click advertising, with content providers to give searchers access to more than 100 millions images, such as Apple iPods, Harley Davidson motorcycles, Microsoft Xbox game consoles and Sony Playstations.
For now, Pixsy makes money through advertising and affiliate partnerships. For example, if an image seen on Pixsy drives traffic to a site that sells a poster of the image, it would collect a small fee. In the future, Norlin said, the company envisions licensing its visual search engine to other companies or publishers.