Picsearch

» see picsearch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I learned the name Picsearch in 2026, writing this page, and that is close to the point of the company. In june 2007 Mynet, then the largest portal in Turkey with something like fourteen million monthly visitors, switched its image and video search over to Picsearch. Anyone in Turkey that year who typed a word into the image box on a Turkish portal was being answered from Stockholm, with no reason to know it.

Two engineering students at Linköping University, Nils Andersson and Robert Risberg, built it around 1999 and 2000 while finishing masters degrees in applied physics and electrical engineering. The company launched in 2000 and the first public version of the search went up in september 2001, within weeks of Google putting up its own image search. Ditto.com had got there before both of them and is gone too.

What Picsearch sold was not a destination. picsearch.com existed and worked, but the business was the licensing deal: you ran a portal, you needed an image tab, you did not want to build and feed a crawler. Lycos signed in may 2005. WEB.DE in november 2006. Maktoob, the Arabic portal, in january 2007. Mynet that june. Yandex took it for a period as well, and by 2017 the index was past three billion images.

The thing customers actually paid a premium for was the filter. Picsearch cost more than the Google and Yahoo alternatives and justified the price on relevance and on being safe to put in front of a general audience without supervision. An Austrian yellow pages company bought it on exactly that basis. For a national portal in a conservative market, an image search that could not embarrass you in public was worth real money.

~ the record ~

~ how it ended ~

There was no lawsuit and no acquisition announcement. In january 2022 the site was replaced by a single line, "We had a great ride. R.I.P. Picsearch 2000 - 2022", and the service pages went dark. By then the company had already put its weight behind Screen9, the online video platform it had grown out of the same crawling and transcoding work, and Screen9 is still trading.

~ the long tail ~

The market Picsearch lived in closed rather than collapsed. Around 2005 every national portal needed its own version of everything, because sending a user to Google was sending them away permanently. Fifteen years later the portals had either died or stopped pretending to do search, and the survivors point their image tab at Bing. There is no longer a customer for a mid-size independent image index anywhere in Europe, which is a quieter way to go than being beaten.

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