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Picsearch

Logo: The logo is from the following website: http://about.picsearch.com http://about.picsearch.com, Non-free logo, via Wikipedia3

Swedish image search company

Picsearch was a Swedish company which developed and provided image search services for large websites. The image search services developed by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as Lycos. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, Turkey and an Arabic language portal.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

2000Founded1

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Picsearch was a Swedish company which developed and provided image search services for large websites. The image search services developed by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as Lycos. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, Turkey and an Arabic language portal. Customers outside the sphere of search portals included telecoms, entertainment sites, e-commerce, sport websites, yellow pages and communities. In January 2022, the official website was changed to declare "We had a great ride. R.I.P. Picsearch 2000 - 2022" and its usual service pages went dark.2

The story

Picsearch was developed and founded in the year, 1999–2000, at Linköping University by two engineering students Nils Andersson and Robert Risberg, who were working on their Master of Science in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. Their goal was to improve relevancy, create a larger index, and to introduce family-friendly and spam filtered results. The company was launched in 2000, and the first public version of the image search engine was available in September 2001, around the same time that Google launched its services. Ditto.com was the first public image search engine.

From Wikipedia’s article on Picsearch, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Products and brands

  • image retrieval

Listed on Wikidata.1

Timeline

  1. 2000Founded Founded in Stockholm1

Sources

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