Techniques for identifying color profiles for textual queries

A computing system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• memory containing instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the computer system to:
• receive a query that contains text including one or more terms that indicate a desired content for an image, the query being received by a search engine;
• generate query features based on the one or more terms of the query;
• compare the query features of the query to a plurality of query features of a plurality of queries having associated color histograms to thereby identify a particular color histogram for the query, the plurality of queries being processed by the search engine;
• identify a set of candidate images that are each associated with respective candidate color histograms, each of the set of candidate images at least partially matching the desired content and the particular color histogram of the query;
• ranking the set of candidate images based in part on a similarity of the candidate color histogram of each candidate image with the identified color histogram of the query;
• and
• causing, on a display device, output of results that satisfy the query, the results including the ranked set of candidate images.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium with instructions stored thereon that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

• generating query features based on text including terms of a query;
• processing the query features in accordance with a machine learning process to identify a color profile indicative of a color intent of the query, the color profile including a probability distribution over a plurality of color bins;
• identifying a set of candidate images that at least partially match the color intent of the query, the set of candidate images being identified from among a plurality of images available to a search engine;
• and
• associating the query and the set of candidate images such that a subsequent query with a common color intent causes the search engine to retrieve search results including at least some of the set of candidate images.