Web Development Magazine

Find relevant, free images on Sprixi

I just stumbled upon this great little service that allows you to find images incredibly relevant to your search terms, which are completely free for you to use, by finding images that use a Creative Commons license, or are in the public domain. Looking for images for your latest project? Don’t want to worry about paying up or asking permission from the creator, but don’t mind giving them credit? Look no further.

Sprixi really is a great resource… It gathers images from Flickr, OpenClipArt.org, as well as images that have been uploaded to the site by users, allowing for a gigantic database of searchable (and totally usable) pics.

Not only that, but they’re wonderfully organized to be relevant to exactly what you’re searching. This is an image search engine that learns over time… It takes information and data from usage of searches and results in the searches to build a collection of images relevant to a specific search term. So, over time, the more people that use it, and the more unique search terms that are processed, the more relevant the searches become, and the easier your day is. If you happen to search something that’s never been searched before, it will tell you that you’ve created a new topic, and the moderation of relevant images starts with you.

It’s a bit confusing at first, I know… But give it time, and it really becomes something of an intelligent search buddy, helping you find relevant images for whatever projects you need.

Let’s get a bit deeper into it, to help you understand…
When you search for something, you get images as results. Fair enough, it’s an image search engine. When you click that image, it will bring it up in the middle of your screen. By then mousing over that image, you can select “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe,” as to whether that specific image is relevant to the search term that you typed. If you register, your vote means more.
Spirxi also has other algorithms to decide the usefulness of an image, but that’s mostly behind-the-scenes stuff that you won’t get to see, but it does end up helping you.

Now, after the usefulness is determined, the images are sorted. Most useful images come up first, so if you search “Snow,” the first image will hold the most usefulness out of any of the images to that search term. All the most relevant results are on top… It’s convenient.

If you feel like giving back after all this taking… Well, you’ve been giving back the whole time. Just by using it, you increase its use to others as well as yourself. Of course, you can also upload your own images and go out of your way to vote up relevant images regularly, but you do help out, just by using it. Finding free images, guilt-free, has never been so easy.

As far as I know, anyway. This is the first service like this that I’ve seen… If you know of a similar service, let us know in the comments.