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rfaces: a browser sidebar (intended for end users), and an advanced search (indented for experienced users). III. BROWSER SIDEBAR The interface for end users consists in a sidebar for the browser2 (see Figure 1). When the user is browsing images on Flickr site and wants to perform a search, he must copy the URL of the image that is viewing and paste it into the URL input text of the sidebar. The resulting set of objects are displayed to the user sorted by relevance, measured as the distance of each element in the collection to the query object. The user can click on a thumbnail for accessing the published image on Flickr web site. IV. ADVANCED SEARCH In the advanced search3 (see Figure 2) the user can enter the query image by different means: uploading an image file, entering the URL of a public image, entering a Flickr URL that displays an image (this is the only way in which the query image will contain textbased and contentbased 2For adding a sidebar in Firefox, create a bookmark to the URL edit the properties of the bookmark, and mark the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” checkbox. Figure 1. The sidebar installed in Firefox. features), or selecting one of the previous query images (useful for reusing query images). Then, the user may enter a search text. The words in the search text restricts the universe of objects for the similarity search. If the user did not enter a search text, the textbased features of the query image, if there is any, are used as search text. If the query image does not contain textbased features, the search will be performed over the whole collection. Once entered the query image and text, the user can select the features for the parison, the distance function for each feature, and the weight of each one in the final distance. Then, the system performs a kNN search using the normalized weighed bination of distances. The resulting set of objects are displayed to the user, and for each result the calculated distance to the query object is shown. The system displays a “similar images” link for each result, allowing to start a new search but using the selected object as a query object, and a link to the published image on Flickr web site. V. RUNTIME PERFORMANCE The sys