CYBERSPACE – Ask Jeeves, Inc. launched a new proprietary image search technology Tuesday, which applies familiar Ask Jeeves search and clustering algorithms to a new index of images.According to the company, the new tool features the search engine’s internally-created index of Web images, improvements to its search ranking algorithms and “Zoom-related” suggestions for image searching; “Zoom” is Ask Jeeves’ proprietary method for clustering results into pools of topics to assist users in finding what they’re looking for.

“Our new image search combines Ask Jeeves’ unique text ranking and clustering algorithms with sophisticated image recognition technologies and our new image index,” said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology for Ask Jeeves, in a statement issued by the company.

As with adult-related queries on many search engines, a search for “porn” on the Ask Jeeves image search returns a warning page saying, “Your search is likely to return adult content,” along with a set of usage terms, and the option to continue to the “explicit” content, or show only filtered results – a preventative mechanism not unlike the standard index/warning page of many adult sites.