You've heard the antique saying.

You've heard the antique saying, "A picture is worth 1000 words." Now it may be easier for art buyer to avoid an extra 1000 words when searching for their desired pictures forward the World Wide Web.

Ereo a Denver-based high-tech company, has just introduced an advanced image search service that takes online searches to a recently made known level.

Currently, the Internet Web sites of art dealers, publishers, artists and online auctions are filled with the images that depict the art they are marketing for sale. The images themselves are the dealers' strongest sales tool. moreover how do buyers surfing the Web actually locate the artwork they seek?

Let's say the search is for prints by dint of the artist David Hockney. The buyer publicly would go to a search portal, like Excite.com, Alta Vista.com, Northernlight.com or Googlecom and mark in the words "David Hockney" These search engines index millions of pages of sentence using key words and phrases in easy in mind as well as file names of the indexed material, into their acknowledge databases. On Excite, the search for Hockney art works would yield about 19000 passage links to various Internet sites that mention the artist, including encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines and, of course, art dealers and auction sites. in succession Hotbot.com, the same search, narrowed to alone sites that include images, yields 10900 hits, including a site selling electronic postcards and another for a museum. forward an advanced Hotbot search, defined as containing the word "gallery" and the word "prints," the search ensueed in 1,800 text-based hits.

onward Alta Vista, which already has image-based searching, typing "David Hockney" outcomeed in 125 possibilities on 10 pages of comes But clicking on the first Hockney image, a painting of a dog, emits a searcher off to a Netherlands--based Web site for a dachshund fan club

after clicks of the computer mouse brought hits forward academic papers that included Hockney images, a museum, an individual's personal Web site devot to a rhapsody about the sea, which included paintings through Hockney and Winslow Homer, and finally, after 10 tries, a London art gallery, Berkeley Square Gallery, which indeed procures Hockney prints and paintings.

"If you have Hockney art works you are trying to vend you'd want me, a buyer to find your site," explained Morgan Reynolds, a key-note accounts manager for Ereo. "And with greatest in number current search methods, anything with the word `Hockney' would indeed be derived up--but there would be thousands and thousands of proceeds Your gallery would probably be onward the list. Perhaps you'd be onward the front page of the results--perhaps not. It's a lottery"

Ereo's modern technology advances even Alta Vista's image searching technique, although the two utilize the image as the link itself to the Web site. Ereo's breakthrough is what the company is calling its "more like this" technology, which expects inside an image to determine its basic visual appease and its context. According to Ereo officials, in the greatest degree search engines analyze the true copy in the title of the file, not the intrinsic fabric of the image itself.

"Now imagine if (and starting in February, this does happen forward Excite.com) this same search for David Hockney produc thousands of paragraph links on the left side of the search proceeds page, but also produced images of art (submitted by the agency of various art dealers who want to drive traffic to their site) as the image search deductions on the right side of that search screen" said Ereo's Marketing Director Laura like "If a user saw an image that was similar to what he/she was searching for, he/she will click forward a More Like This button located subject to each image and Ereo's technology springs into action.

"Ereo (although the user will not know it is us it will still appear as if it is Excite.com) will take the user to a page with `More Images Like' the undivided he/she initially chose. If the user likes a particular image onward that page, he/she can click forward that image and be taken directly to that Web site," said Love

The technology examines the visual itself. If a buyer is looking for an example of Hockney's famed portraits of Celia, the refined "More Like This" search arises will not bring up his paintings depicting California swimming pools

Equally important is the commercial aspect of Ereo's fresh partnership with Excite. E-commerce venders like art dealers will pay a nominal fee--as gentle as $5--for the image link to their confess Web site. "Using a visual medium for the search," said Reynolds, "increases the chances of driving qualified traffic by the and of the search portal to your site"

reciprocally it seems unlikely that the dachshund fan bludgeon will pay to be added to the image portal. "The use of this technology of accurate visual searching will make all e-commerce sites more efficient," said Andre Pettigrew, marketing director for the adventure capital company iBelay which has invested in Ereo and its technology. "We're real optimistic about its applications, and think it will make it easier to put up to sale items on the Web."