London - May 25, 2005 - Royalty-free stock photography agency PunchStock is making the process of searching for and viewing their online collection of over 600,000 images even easier, with two major online enhancements. PunchStock's new guided search is a paradigm-busting breakthrough in image search technology, while the new liquid layout Web site design is a fluid, flexible image-viewing feature that automatically resizes browser windows and allows customers to maximize monitor real estate by tiling a large number of image thumbnails online.

The groundbreaking new guided search is a highly sophisticated, acutely optimized tool. Driven by keyword queries, guided search, based on catalogued image data, sorts results into topical categories ranked by relevancy and volume. The new search also guides customers through the image search navigation process to find perfect images without tediously sorting through hundreds of result pages. Logical, organized ordering and helpful user-controlled filters add value to PunchStock's offerings and saves browsing time by reducing the extraneous noise so often returned by most search engines.

"When we decided to focus on search, we weren't too impressed by what we saw out there," says PunchStock CEO Miles Gerstein. "Keywords work pretty well on an image-by-image basis, but different stock companies use very different types of keywords to describe the same images, and the same company's keywords aren't always consistent. Instead, we concentrated on organizing all of PunchStock's vendors' keywords in a unique way that our customers will find useful. Finding the right stock image really means finding the right combination of different aspects of an image, aspects that work together to satisfy a particular need. Our new technology concentrates on helping customers discover the aspects of our collection that work for them."
PunchStock has also enhanced their online offerings with the addition of liquid layout - a fluid Web site design that allows customers to reduce wasted browser space and tile a large number of images by automatically resizing the PunchStock.co.uk browser window. Liquid layout empowers customers to expand PunchStock.co.uk to view as many image tiles as their monitor size allows. For busy, multitasking graphic designers, this is a welcome change as it capitalizes on screen space and allows control and flexibility of image viewing.

PunchStock is celebrating the launch of guided search with its Find It! campaign, a promotion that includes two all-expense-paid holidays Amsterdam and Barcelona. Customers can enter by performing an image search which leads to an entry point.

New guided search and liquid layout are just two of the ways that PunchStock is challenging outdated practices within the stock photography community and exceeding customer needs and expectations by making it easier to navigate the 600,000+ image collection and find picture-perfect royalty-free stock images.

For more information about PunchStock.co.uk and to experience guided search and liquid layout, please visit: www.punchstock.co.uk