Images on a web page can provide a chance to express ideas in a visual way that can convey a considerable amount of information, and may also add to the attractiveness and perceived quality of a site.When search engines rank pages in search results, images may have some impact in those rankings.
7 Comments
7 Comments
Comments
Thanks for submitting this, Manny, and thanks to everyone who sphunn it.This is the second patent application I’ve seen this year from Microsoft that delves more deeply into how a search engine may look at information associated with pictures. What’s interesting is that each image on a page may be given different weights, or ignored completely, based upon the importance of the pictures to the page and site, and that can influence the weight of the text and meta data associated with those pictures in the ranking of a page, or in other uses, such as whether a picture might accompany a snippet shown in search results.
Thanks for always staying ontop of all of these patents for us, Bill, I always save your posts and go over them in detail, several times they are always full of great info. Keep it up man!
You’re welcome, Manny.Glad to hear that you’re getting as much value out of my posts as I am in finding these patent filings and writing about them.
@steaprok Funny that you mention that. I visited Bills site today to read a post for likely the 4th time in detail and was thinking how bright he is. Thanks Bill!
Thank you Michael.Thought I saw you in my mybloglog widget earlier today.
I am more concerned about how Google actually evaluates images.
That’s understandable, John.I think one of the things that we might get out of this patent filing from Microsoft are questions that we might ask about what Google may be doing when they consider if information from images should be included in relevancy determinations for pages.There was a paper from Google presented in Beijing this past April at the WWW18 that discusses some approaches to evaluating images that you might find interesting - PageRank for Product Image Search (pdf)