Searching for information on the web is cumbersome. Given our experiences today, we may not even want to think about searching for multimedia information on the (multimedia) web.

Nevertheless, in this chapter we will briefly sketch one of the possible scenarios indicating the need for multimedia search. In fact, once we have the ability to search for multimedia information, many scenarios could be thought of.

As a start, we will look at two media types, images and documents. We will study search for images, because it teaches us important lessons about content analysis of media objects and what we may consider as being similar. Perhaps surprisingly, we will study text documents because, due to our familiarity with this media type, text documents allow us to determine what we may understand by effective search.

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technology