During a keyword search, Image Surfer looks for your term in the page title, directory or file name, or a link leading to an image file. Just as with text searching, there is no guarantee that the picture will match your keyword. In my testing, tree turned up Whiffle Tree Quilts , and beach found beach resorts , but also Huntington Beach High School . The search engine finds forms of the word, not just the string you type. Keyword search results do not provide seed images for visual searching.
Results display as thumbnails and text.
The type of text depends on whether you've searched or browsed. For searches, the page title shows. When browsing, you see not only the page title, but the picture's URL and that of the page on which it resides. Lycos Lycos builds on and expands AltaVista's method. Like AltaVista, it looks at file extensions to identify images, then searches the file or directory name to see if there's a match on your query term.