What We're Up To
SearchArtGalleries.com is the first and only search engine for fine art. We have the largest collection of fine art from art galleries and local artists online. Our system gathers and indexes artwork thumbnails directly from gallery web sites. We currently have over 3 times more artworks than any other site because we don't rely on for-fee submissions by galleries. If you're an art buyer, you probably don't have time to visit hundreds of galleries and thousands of artist websites. SearchArtGalleries.com lets you search for artwork in all those galleries using criteria like medium, genre, city, size, and color. Once you've found a few pieces you like, our 'more like this' search lets you find other artworks that are visually similar. This helps art buyers narrow down which galleries they'd like to visit. If you're an artist, gallery owner, or collector interested in selling artwork, SearchArtGalleries.com helps you reach a highly qualified audience of people interested in purchasing fine art.
You're currently using Alpha level software, which is meant to demonstrate core functionality, but it may have the occasional hickup. Please let us know what you think on the feedback page.
Participate
If you're an artist or gallery owner, SearchArtGallery's 'add your artwork' tab allows you to add your gallery or artist site URL so that our crawler will include your artwork in the site. SearchArtGallery also uses information about artists to deliver relevant results - we already have tens of thousands of artists in our database. Artists and gallery owners may also add artists or edit their genre, medium, or other categorization. See the Information for Galleries and Artists page for more information on adding artist and gallery information to our search results. Your participation will help us connect art buyers with artists and galleries by providing the best art search on the Internet.
Technology
SearchArtGalleries combines visual search based on image analysis, search on a structured index, and community driven search. SearchArtGallery's internet crawler visits thousands of art gallery and artist websites, identifies art images and extracts relevant artwork attributes. Much like Google revolutionized internet search with PageRank's popularity and authority driven result ranking, SearchArtGallery's ArtRank uses many attributes to determine relevancy for art buyers. Starting with the image itself, color, texture, and composition relate every image to every other image. Images are then grouped by medium, genre, and other attributes. Finally, SearchArtGallery uses click-thru, artist importance, and other user behavior to serve up the more popular images first.
Business
For most product categories you can go to one website like Google or Shopping.com or store like BestBuy and quickly find out everything that's available and where to buy it. Since buyers value convenience and comprehensive selection, these sites and stores have become highly profitable through either advertising or sales. Art is one of the few markets that lacks anywhere for consumers to browse a comprehensive catalogue of available products and get relevant results for their searches. If you're looking to buy original art most cities have hundreds of physical art galleries and thousands of artists with their own websites. Worldwide there are hundreds of thousands of art galleries. Most of us want to see the art in person before we buy it, but we don't have time to visit all these galleries, either physically or by visiting their website. Search engines solve this problem, but other search engines are capable of finding images only if you can use text to describe exactly what you're looking for. Since most artwork is unique, lacks descriptive text tags, and is primarily visual, other search engines are ineffective at helping art buyers discover which galleries carry art that meets their preferences. While the art world includes many web sites and magazines that feature art and advertisements submitted by galleries, none of them allow users to search over more than a tiny fraction of the available inventory.
In short, SearchArtGalleries is the only search engine that enables search for art on any of the criteria relevant to users: comprehensiveness, relevancy, locality, and key product characteristics. SearchArtGallery's crawler and indexing technology is the first to enable to a comprehensive selection of art that spans hundreds of thousands of sites that sell art, including gallery websites, artist sites, poster art sites, and various online retailers. SearchArtGallery will address a high end demographic of over 10 million users, enabling highly targeted advertising opportunities for art galleries as well as other luxury goods. If you're an investor with interest in the art market, we'd like to talk to you.
