If you are looking for images of the recent Japan earthquake, you will be surprised to note that pretty much all of the major search engines fall flat – right from Google, Bing to Yahoo. They work only when you enter the right queries – i.e. there surely is lack of understanding of context in the search engines.

NachoFoto, a Mumbai (and California) based startup has launched its service (still in beta) that uses semantic technology and leverages user intent versus user search patterns for delivering the freshest results.

In essence, NachoFoto is  a semantic time-based vertical search engine for images and is comprised of following features

• Related searches – The related searches list organizes and recommends a host of related images by topic, time or event – driving users to images that they would otherwise miss.
• Image results – NachoFoto delivers most recent image results relevant to the user query. Each thumbnail photo includes a timestamp (e.g., “6 hours ago”), the image source and related images.
• Timeline – With the timeline feature, users can choose to view the latest images, oldest images, or go directly to the month with the most images.

To give you an idea, most of search engines show images from relevance perspective (so even 2010’s Japan earthquake images will be shown if you search for Japan earthquake images) and this is where NachoFoto has a differentiator.

As far as monetization plans are concerned, the company will pursue technology licensing opportunities with search engines and web portals, instead of building a pure consumer services.