Discovering authoritative images of people entities

Computer storage media having computer-executable instructions embodied thereon that, when executed by one or more computing devices, cause the one or more computing devices to perform a method of identifying and ranking authoritative images of people entities, the method comprising:

• identifying authoritative images for a person entity;
• extracting features for the authoritative images;
• mining search engine logs to identify queries for the person entity;
• utilizing the queries and the features to construct candidate queries for the person entity;
• issuing the candidate queries against an image index to retrieve candidate image URLs;
• training a classifier with training data associated with the features;
• running the classifier on candidate images associated with the candidate image URLs;
• tagging each candidate image with an entity identification (ID) tag;
• and
• ranking images with the entity ID tag higher in the search engine results page than images without the entity ID tag.

A computer system that facilitates discovering authoritative images of people entities, the computer system comprising a processor coupled to a computer storage medium, the computer storage medium having stored thereon a plurality of computer software components executable by the processor, the computer software components comprising:

• a selection component that receives a selection of a person entity;
• an entity extraction component that extracts similar entities to the person entity;
• a uniform resource locator component that identifies authoritative uniform resource locators (URLs) for the person entity;
• an image component that identifies authoritative images for the person entity;
• an authoritative feature extraction component that extracts features for the authoritative images;
• a mine component that mines search engine logs to identify queries for the person entity;
• a construct component that utilizes the queries and the features to construct candidate queries for the person entity;
• an issue component that issues the candidate queries against a search engine image index to retrieve candidate image URLs;
• and
• a candidate feature extraction component that extracts candidate features for each candidate image from the candidate image URLs.