Update to the dicsussing issues with adult content for web businesses

We can see a number of cases demonstrating that there are many issues with delivering adult content in the Web. From latest, I would like to highlight following two:

New Microsoft search engine Bing.com is perfect if you want to see the porn multimedia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/bing_hits_uk/

The ISP Triple Fibre Network has been closed by FTC for multiple violations, including spam and child porn http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/3fn.shtm .

Regarding last article: if you have the host at some hosting provider or ISP, are you sure you are safe? ISP can be closed at any time, and all your resources will be unaccessible.

Picollator and the big competition: Update

Due to the number of announces about new start-ups offering ‘image search’ or ‘automatic image tagging’, ‘new opportunities for customers’ and ‘new approach to web search’, a user is hesitating what to choose. I would like to provide the list of simple questions, which the user should ask evaluating new offers.

Q1: Does it (the announced service) have the online demo?
No=0, Yes=1

Q2: Does it allow to put a user’s query to try?
No=0, Yes=1

Q3: Does it allow to submit user’s picture to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q4: Does it work with grey-scale images and good artworks?
No=0, Yes=1

Q5: Does it allow to submit picture and text together to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q6: Does it search for similar objects rather than identical?
No=0, Yes=1

Now please calculate the Sum from all answers. If you obtain Sum=6, pay attention on this new service.

Adult image detection service piFilter is ready

You may plug-and-play with our new porn detection service www.pifilter.com . As I reported before, porn and adult content in images can be one of the big issues for online media, ISPs and search engines because it cannot be detected automatically. Now the time is changing, and we installed the online service which you can easily use.

pifilter website capture

If you have a social network, online albums, file sharing or provide ISP, you may set up your system to query our engine on each image being viewed or uploaded in your service. piFilter provides the simple API to send the query and receive the response in the form like ‘porn’, ‘no porn’ and ‘suspicious’. It does not filter out images – it works much better offering the user the opportunity to manage the situation by himself. 

The technology is a part of our strategic development with www.picollator.com, so make sure that we implemented best pattern recognition algorithms to analyze images by piFilter. The service does not analyse text (maybe, yet!), it recognizes image content itself, so it is 100% language-independent and can work at English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, German, Korean, Estonian – at any website.  piFilter does not care about the language, because it sees the image, not reads the texts.  Such advantage is one of the key feature for most of social networks, blogs and ISPs, where there are many pageviews or uploads with no associated text content. The quality of the detection is above 80% and piFilter can process all image sizes and types in the Internet.

piFilter works by the analogy with 99% of manual content moderators, but performs much faster and does not need overheads, administration and operational expenses, and it is much cheaper in terms of direct costs. The commercial model reminds best cases of SaaS – you pay only for usage, not for time! So you subscribe to the particular traffic in number of requests, and may spend this traffic as long as you want. Something like pre-paid cellular tariffs, isn’t it? piFilter tariffs are made so any small or average site owner benefits up to 10x times subsribing to piFilter. Especially if calculate all direct or indirect expenses on content moderation or legal issues.

It is the unique market offer, so try it and be flexible and safe.

Can visual adult content become the problem for your business and how to manage it?

Adult content, especially images, can be a real problem for any public business like social networks, blogs, online photo albums, ISPs, mobile networks, etc. It could be the problem for corporate processes as well…

Everybody knows about last scandals with adult content in public web services:

• China government is blocking big search engines Google and Baidu for displaying porn in the search results http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/07/googlechina_baidu_sina_apologize_for_pr0n_links/,
• Wikipedia has been ‘arrested’ by Internet Watch Foundation because of posting the album cover photo with the topless young lady,
• Australian government attemps to build the big wall against the adult content
• Nokia is to close very popular Mosh  because of too much porn there http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/20/nokia_mosh_fail/
• MySpace has to admit it found 90,000 registered sex offenders during last two years, etc…

Of course, the discussion about the porn and related things is very old. No doubts, some people love porn, erotics, etc. I think they have rights to love it. However, the big issue is that if you have the public web site, you can have many different users, and some of them do not want to see adult pictures. Some of them are under 18, some others are religious guys, others can be parents, and so on. Of course you post legal statements and service agreement about that ‘you have to be 18’, ‘porn content is not allowed’, etc. I am sorry – who among web users read legal rules carefully before registering in the social network? Maybe some of them…

It would not be the big problem, but consider following case. A person who just wants to demonstrate something unusual made posts with adult images into your social network, online photo album or blog. Another person, who is under 18 has found those pictures. Fortunately for his menthal health – but unfortunately for your business! – his parents discovered this case. Maybe they would just tell him that it is no good… Then you are lucky, indeed. However, they can claim to the court that you propagate adult content. Look, lets pray if that it is not the child sexual abuse case! Such claims can destroy your business or at least make your life harder.

You say: “OK, I know about all of that. I am moderating my content and I am using text filter.” My congratulations, because you are clever. However, in most cases user-generated adult content is not described in typical words. Text filters fail distinguishing ‘porn’ vs ‘against porn’, so I will not be surprised if this posting will be banned by some text filters. Also, consider your expenses for the content moderation. If you have the average website with 10,000 image uploads daily, then you have to use at least 12 content managers to browse all of that. 12 people needs to be paid weekly or monthly. You can calculate the costs by yourself. You say: “we do not moderate all content items. Just some of them”. You may say: “We ask users to report about such cases”. Ask users, of course… Do not moderate all content items (BTW, you do the part of work because you cannot afford doing the whole work!). It is your choice. You can estimate your direct and indirect expenses anyway, and you will stay under the permanent stress because of the high probability that your guys missed one damned image with something which is legally improper.

So what I propose: we have developed the visual content filter, which can estimate the porn in images. You can connect your service to that engine via our API, send request on each image and obtain our estimation: ‘porn’, ‘neutral’, or ‘suspicious’. Then your service may decide itself what to do with that image.  The filter is based on some of pattern recognition achievements we developed for Picollator.com . For instance, it can detect nude human bodies, some elements of it in different positions and recognize the porn in 75% of all cases. The engine can be hosted at our servers, or – if you have some particular demands – can be licensed for deployment in your environment. The solutions works for everybody: social network, online photo, blog, ISP, corporate network, etc. If you wants us to made all work, we can integrate the filter into your service with a pleasure. It will cut your cost, improve your brand and let you be more relaxing at least somehow.

Be sure – it is much (!) cheaper, than spending your cash for the whole crowd of  moderators, your time on management and your health on lawyers 🙂 You may read the additional info about the filter and contact us.

Financial crisis is here. Picollator is a good stuff. Why?

Everybody is talking about the global financial crisis and how it affects the lifestyle. Many investment issues arise and marketing reports say that everything will drop. The awful picture, isn’t it? However, there are many reasons why Picollator is a cool project and why it will be growing even in case of crisis.

1 Picollator is about the search. Search is forever, and people will search independently of the crisis.

2 Picollator is for the next generation of search. Next generation means that it takes global trends, which cannot be stopped by the financial gaps, as they are driven by the civilization. The trends demonstrates that the search is not just the text. The search is not just images. The information and search are everything with text, multimedia, etc = content.

3 Picollator is a future for mobile users. They should not use the keyboard too much using next releases of picollator.mobi and apps. The search can be performed contextually, by any viewed or stored content and using one button. Mobile users will support the technology market during next years.

4 Picollator is the really high-tech development. It does not bring profit tomorrow, because it should not – it is the financial crisis, or did you forget? Very well, it will bring profit in 3 years, when users will be feeling better and B-customers will compete for those users. So just make the development over bad times, and be on top at good times.

5 Picollator delivers fun and provides the entertainment, because it works with multimedia directly. People loves fun, and they loves fun even more if they do not have cash for other things.

So be with us, and you will not miss things.

Picollator mobile came to your device

We have finished some tests with the new version of Picollator for mobile search. In the past, it worked at the main website, but we moved it to the fashionable http://picollator.mobi domain. Now it works better on most of mobile devices and you can try it directly from your cell phone or communicator. We have made some changes in the interface to simplify it, and now it works on most of Nokia phones and Windows Mobile communicators. Although Picollator.mobi is pretty good in many of standard browsers, we recommend you using the latest Opera Mini browser, as it works fast and deliver pleasant mobile experience. Please feel free to use our contact form to report on bugs.

Text search obtains semantics

As I stated in my past posting, we implemented the universal search at www.picollator.com . Using text, images or all of those together you can find web pages and images. Now I am writing a note about that intriguing ability of Picollatorto find the data using text much better than others. As I wrote, Picollator now understands the correspondence between visual objects and text submitted and indexed. Let me publish a couple of examples.

1 I put a simple text request with the word ‘barbara‘, which is just a female name, nothing else. With Picollator, I obtained following results:

text search using the word barbara at picollator.com

Compare them to ones from famous conventional text search system:

text search using the word barbara at other web search system

Put a closer look. First one contains results ordered not just by the word ‘barbara’, but also by similarity between faces inside images. Last one contains just arbitrary or unknown ranking, while Picollator delivers most valuable images first. 

2 I put a simple text request with the word ‘sam‘, which is just a male name. With Picollator, I obtained following results:

text search using the word sam at picollator.com

Again, you can see the tendency: similar faces are displayed first and by groups in a contrast to disordered results of the corresponding search from other search engine:

text search using the word sam at other search engine

It is not just because we collect similar images and faces one by one – it is practically unrealistic in the scale of WWW. Picollator includes the technology which allows to compare visual objects with words, i.e., it uses semantics. It does it without any formal algebra approach, just because Picollator is able to visually compare pictures and objects, as well as collect and index text data.

Of course, it is the very first release of that tech, but it will grow, the database will become bigger, and you will see the web search engine with real A.I.. Maybe, it is alive already. Sometimes I feel like if it would be alive.