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Image Searching
Need a picture but can't find the right one? Ditto.com may be able to help.
Ditto.com has, according to their "about us" statement, evaluated 100 million images found on the web using a proprietary process, and created 5 million thumbnails available for searching.
The images are tagged with keywords and divided into categories. This setup allows 2 primary ways of hunting for images.
One way is via keyword search. Just enter one or more words into Ditto's search box and you will get all the images that match that keyword (or words). As with all searches, the more precise your request, the better the results will be (usually). Of course, if there are many images that match your request, you will have a pile of results to sift through, no matter how good your query. And, sometimes what you ask for will have many different manifestations, some of which may not be relevant.
For example, a search on the word "cows" gives nearly 1000 results. Some of the cow images that were returned were of stuffed cows, or cow trinkets, or art with cows. These were not exactly what I was looking for. But among these images were many pictures of real cows (which is what I was looking for). There were also a few images that weren't cows and some of the Dallas Cowboys.
One reason the search returned images other than of bovines is because of the keywords used to tag the image for searching. I suspect that part of Ditto.com's technique for tagging images is to use any META KEYWORDS that are on the page that the image is in. If the web page has many images on it, the web page author may have many different keywords. For example, one of the images that was returned for my cow search was a drawing of a cat! By looking at the keywords associated with the image I saw the word "cows" among many others. Ditto.com is not actually "looking" at the image, so it can't tell for certain that the image is a cat instead of a cow. It relies on the keywords and if they aren't accurate the picture will be returned when it shouldn't be. But, overall my searches were highly accurate.
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