On Thursday, the Picture Archive Council of America launched a proprietary tool to provide the industry with a free stock-image meta-search engine: pacaSearch.
While it will never be confused with Google, said PACA, the new search engine offers one key buyer benefit Google does not have: pacaSearch only returns results for licensable imagery—not personal pictures or ill-attributed material. “This can be especially problematic for professional image buyers,” explains the organization.
Doug Dawirs, the creator of pacaSearch, told Selling Stock that the search engine currently represents 53.6 million images, and that several large agencies not represented—such as Corbis and Dreamstime—have indicated intent.
Offering a combined index of multiple PACA member libraries, pacaSearch returns results by relevance and highest number of matches. Image licensing transactions are referred to original agency Web sites.
For member agencies, this means achieving broader online distributions of their image libraries at negligible costs. PACA also hopes that the new search engine will facilitate new relationships between buyers and member agencies. In addition, pacaSearch will offer participating agencies valuable information on site traffic, number of searches, most frequent terms used, and terms with no search results.
Perhaps most importantly, pacaSearch does not collect a fee, bounty or royalty of any kind. “PACA took on this project as a means to expose their members’ archives to a broader marketplace. PACA is working to be an advocate for our members commercially as well as with industry standards and issues,” said PACA president Maria Kessler in a statement.
With additional reporting by Jim Pickerell.