PanImages is a new search engine coming out of the University of Washington that allows users to search for images in their native language.

The search engine Like.com allows searches via image queries, but are far from becoming mainstream. The image search today is conducted by an analysis of the metadata around the image. In an image search on Google for tag “flower” in the photo metadata have returns 5 times more result than for Spanish, a search for “flores”.

Search engines are now beginning to allow cross-language queries to return more results to people who speak less popular languages. PanImages supports over 300 languages. Users simply type in the query and the language they are speaking and see a result set that includes translation. Clicking on a result return Google Image and Flickr search results for that term.

The data itself is still somewhat thin, and users are asked to add translations when the site doesn’t already know what you mean. But the early results are useful, particularly if you speak a fairly obscure language.

PanImages - Cross-Lingual Image Search Subscribe to updates