Flickroo – A jQuery tool for testing image relevancy in search

Flickroo – A jQuery tool for testing image relevancy in search

Posted by legacye in Home on 07 16th, 2009 | no responses

Relevancy is something that can be difficult to achieve in any search system – I know this because at the last company I worked at a lot of research time was put into making sure relevancy could be improved almost every week!. With images, relevancy can become an even trickier challenge, especially when users are allowed to submit their own content on the fly and can tag this content manually. A simple mistake like a mistag or no other useful info in the picture’s discription can lead to some pretty insane results (and I’m talking more insane than an evening out with Lindsay Leave-me-alohan :). This can mean the difference between a piece of fruit being correctly labelled as an apple.. instead of an orange. Users can be very unforgiving when they can’t find what they’re after and I think it’s important for search companies to invest in making sure that the first page of results that users get with any keyword are as relevant as possible.

To help demonstrate image relevancy, I picked a popular image search API (Flickr) and built a small jQuery carousel tool around it so you can test sets of images from Flickr using tags. Every time you hit next it’ll grab you the next set of images using that tag and also includes a history section too. In some cases your search results could appear a little infinite. Although I could have spent more time on the UI, I think the tool should let you get a grasp of where the quality of Flickr’s search results lie :)

Thankfully, in the future we can hope to see services (such as Google Labs and Pixsta Ltd), increasing the use of image processing techniques in the marketplace to correctly match images which should mean tagging could become less and less important. Heres to hoping!

To run the demo, click here.