Nachofoto Real-Time Image Search Lives Up to The Hype

Nachofoto is a real-time image search engine that allows you to sift through the web for the most recent and relevant results for popular search queries, i.e. “fresh” pictures of trending topics. SEW puts the new search engine through it’s paces on a very recent event, the “Times Square bomb alert”.

How it works

Nachofoto’s tool relies on four factors:

• What the company calls “recency factor” or “freshness” (much friendlier term, I agree) of an image that the semantic text analysis algorithm can determine

 

• The image density of a webpage that allows for prioritizing in favour of highest quality pictures

 

• The inward links – yes, watch your inward links anchor texts as they will weigh substantially in the choice

 

• Domain authority, defined by Nachofoto as “domains with fresh, family friendly high density images”.

 

“Fresh”, you say?
The company explains both in its Nachofoto white paper, and case study that when users type in recent topics, they expect to see the latest pictures and not some old, static image content that sits there awaiting to be conjured up by a feisty web surfer.

For instance, Nachofoto cites the case of the iPad launch throughout the day on April 3rd: entering just the word “iPad” would yield the latest images of the crowds lining up in front of stores then, as the day goes on, pictures of the launch itself and the happy new iPad owners, then images later on of people unpacking their new fancy toy.
Meanwhile, competitors Google, Bing and Yahoo could only return static images of an iPad, or the Apple HQs and other products on that day. With just the same word search: “iPad”
So yes, it is definitely “fresh“.

Time for my test drive
I elected to do my search on “Times Square bomb alert”.

Nachofoto gave me this:

Google images gave me this:

Bing yielded this:

And Yahoo this:

By far, Nachofoto gave me the most satisfactory results, with the actual images on the night the bomb scare took place, plus pictures of the hero, the street vendor who reported the suspicious vehicle to NYPD.

Yahoo’s return came second best in my view but again, as you may see on the screen captures, all the other engines mix very few “fresh” and to-the-point images with static archive-type pictures.

Shortcomings?
I tried to do the same search in French “alerte à la bombe Times Square”.

The engine does not support accented characters … yet?

And yes, I know, Nachofoto never said I could do the search in a foreign language but I had to try, web is global so global means multiple language capacity. At least.

This might be something the company would like to take a look at in the next release.

Finally…
With one foot in Mill Valley, CA, and the other foot in India, the company certainly knows how to deliver on innovation and freshness.

In our era of widespread real-time communication (remember, not so long ago, you had to be a news agency to get real time news – for real) with Twitter and all geotagging apps crowding our pipes, Nachofoto is certainly a fabulous tool for the Zeitgeist lovers.

And, last but not least, let’s talk figures – according to Nachofoto, this cut of the search market represents 3 percent of the overall pie. FYI, 1 percent of the whole market it valued at $1bn (US) per year. I’ll let you do the math…

My verdict: thumbs up ! Eagerly awaiting Nachofoto’s next release – yes I am.