New image search engine gives users access to diverse image collection.A new photo search engine called Pixsy is aiming to widen the reach of image gathering for creative professionals, agencies and publishers.
With Pixsy, users get access to photos not found by most image search engines, including those from Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which primarily rely on spidering technology to crawl the Web for images, said Rich Lerz, co-founder and chief operating officer for Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Pixsy Inc.
"This approach of spidering limits the type of photos that can be found. Pixsy has partnerships with unique photo databases that enable our users to find photos not found by these search engines. We get access to this diverse content through our unique technology partnerships, so when our partners add new photos, they show up immediately at Pixsy," Lerz said.
Pixsy lets users search for photos on blog networks, mobile blog networks, social networks and random sites through its existing technology partnerships.
For example, users can search on the term "Bill Gates" and the results will include a plethora of Bill Gates photos and graphics. They include photos of Bill Gates' face on the head of a scrambling gingerbread man, lounging across the top of a monitor at a relatively young age and a Warhol-esque painting of the many faces of Gates.
Another unique feature of Pixsy is that users can choose to filter out adult content before searching. Additionally, images gathered from a search include the URL the image originated from.
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For publishers and graphic professionals, the image-based search engine provides a new source of images available on the Web. And unlike such proprietary image collections as Corbis and Getty, which either bought an image archive or work directly with professional photographers, Pixsy is a metasearch engine that pulls images from many different content partners and blends the image search results together, Lerz said.
"The result is a diverse image collection and a mechanism for driving traffic to our content partners," Lerz said.
Lerz said Pixsy will support itself long term as an ad-driven business that serves up contextually relevant visual ads when a user types in a query. For instance, with the Bill Gates query, contextually matching ads appeared beside the reclining image of Gates on the CPU.
It remains to be seen how much impact this latest offering in search will have, but Lerz said the company is continually establishing new partnerships, and the company's longterm plan is to build the largest and most unique metaimage search engine.
