Brand new search technology gets you to the right royalty free photos faster
Lost among hundreds of millions of royalty free photos? Losing tons of time sifting through images that don't really capture what you're looking for? We're coming to the rescue!
A new search is born
Munich in October. With immediate effect a completely new search is live on PantherMedia.net. Based on new technologies and parameters, the new search understands a royalty free photo's content vastly better than before and is able to show far more suitable results than ever before – and that dramatically faster.
IT-Team rips everything out and starts from scratch
PantherMedia’s IT team, under the leadership of Ricardo Cescon, has developed a new search from scratch. The focus was on both improving the quality of the search results as well as significantly increasing speed. The fundamental challenge is to find the most relevant royalty free photos in the shortest possible time and to display them on the first pages. With a rapidly growing archive of currently more than 200 million royalty free photos and other media, this is an increasing challenge. In doing so, both the actual image content and the current visual style are matched with the expectations of an image searcher. Since imagery itself and customers’ visual expectations change over time, a professional search must also be able to adapt to this dynamic.
Some Tech-Talk: ELK Stack combining Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana
After careful analysis, the search engine approach of an ELK stack was selected, which consists of a combination of the technologies from Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK). It allows high availability, scalability and load distribution to be implemented in a simple manner when operated in a network of computers. Our Team got the technologies to dance together and delivers significant gains in performance by allowing numerous parameters to be taken into account in search queries for the design of the search result. This made it possible to come closer to attaining the goal of a perfect search result presented with lighting speed.
Proprietary algorithm achieves astounding understanding of royalty free photo's core subject
We have demonstrably achieved decisive improvements to the understanding of a royalty free photo’s content and core subject. The meaning of an individual royalty free photo’s content and core subject can now be recognized, understood and classified much more precisely with the help of newly developed proprietary algorithms. This in-house developed automated word weighting system plays a special role in the context of the use of metadata and prevents subordinate picture elements from being treated the same as core picture elements. Visual image recognition (machine learning as part of artificial intelligence) will play an increasingly stronger role in the new search in the future. Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack (I mean contacts in a flocati) you can go straight to what you need.
We surprised ourselves with what we could deliver
Tomas Speight, Managing Director of Panther Media GmbH, says about the new search: "The increase in results accuracy, the quality of the mix of results and the speed of the results display went well beyond our expectations and must definitely be experienced."
But don't take my or our word for it. Check it out and rate the searches you make to let us know how you feel! Just give your search a thumbs up or thumbs down. And we'll keep at making it better faster with your help!
Use our simple thumbs at the top or bottom of each search result page and search here.
