Visual websearching using iconic queries

Imagine a professional Web site designer who constantly has to come up with innovative looks for the client's homepages? How does he find the new content? The major search engines such as Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com) allow us to find text on the Web, but typically have few or no capabilities for finding visual media. In this article we discuss methods for finding visual media on the WWW. The emphasis is on iconic queries which are essentially drag-and-drop visual concepts or simple semantics. We describe our method for finding static feature sets and then describe a novel method called active feature sets, which chooses a feature set based on the context in the image.