Picsearch is a Swedish company which develops and provides image search services for large websites. The image search services developed and provided by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as Lycos. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, Turkey and an Arabic language portal. Customers outside the sphere of search portals include telecoms, entertainment sites, e-commerce, sport websites, yellow pages and communities. Picsearch also develops and provides an Online Video Platform under the brand name Screen9 which is used for video communities, vlogging, video reviews on e-commerce sites, corporate video presentations, news videos and virtual showings on real estate portals. Picsearch video streaming service includes flash player, upload, transcoding, hosting and streaming. Some features of the service are flexible quality, user interaction and branding possibilities.
The Picsearch service is slightly more expensive than Google and Yahoo, but according to many of its licensing partners, provides a higher relevance and better family-friendliness.
Coverage
Picsearch is notable for providing one of the largest searchable indexes, providing over 3 billion images in 2017. This compares with Google and Yahoo.
Family-Friendliness
Family-friendliness implies that all sexual nudity, pornography and violence is removed by an automatic filter. Picsearch also offers an image removal service for those wanting their images removed.
Localization
Picsearch services include localization features to tailor the search service to regional markets.
On the 22nd of March 2007, Picsearch implemented a new environmental policy making them the first carbon neutral search engine in the world. The Picsearch initiative was followed by promises from Yahoo in April and Google in June to go carbon neutral by the end of 2007. The policy consists of four steps:
Picsearch plants 1000 new trees for every gigawatt-hour consumed.
Picsearch buys and holds in trust of old growth forest for every gigawatt-hour consumed.
Picsearch only uses electricity that is carbon free and follows the highest standard of production.
Picsearch buys carbon credits equivalent to all the energy that Picsearch consumes.
In July 2007 the Swedish National Criminal Police started working with Picsearch to incorporate a special filter, which will block the visibility of 4000 websites with commercial child pornography. Introducing the filter on Picsearch and other search services, the police authorities are trying to make it more difficult for users to find child pornography. The initiative has sparked some discussion in Sweden and Japan as to whether or not the police authorities are extending their powers, whether the filter threatens freedom of speech, and whether the real reason for introducing the filter is to establish a precedent for denying access to other information as well.
Development and patents
Picsearch has developed all of its search service in-house, including spidering of the Web, indexing of image, video, and audio files, and an efficient way of distributing the results to users from all parts of the world. Picsearch’s algorithms are patented in Sweden and patent-pending in the EU and the United States.
