Google researchers presented a method for improving image search results to attendees of the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing.

They call the software technology VisualRank, intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages. Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing presented a paper titled “PageRank for Product Image Search.” In short, a group of images retrieved for a query using traditional search methods is then further analyzed. Image recognition software finds which images in the group seem most similar to each other. It then estimates “visual hyperlinks” between them to produce a final ranking.