New patent application published for: SEARCH SYSTEM AND SEARCH METHOD

A search system capable of searching for an image with a similar represented concept is provided. The search system includes an input unit, a text extraction unit, a tag obtaining unit, and a tag similarity calculation unit. When image data to which an image label is assigned and document data including the image label are supplied to the input unit, the text extraction unit is configured to extract tag-obtaining-purpose text data from the document data on the basis of the image label. The tag obtaining unit is configured to obtain a tag including at least a part of words included in the tag-obtaining-purpose text data. The tag similarity calculation unit is configured to calculate similarity between tags. It is possible to search for an image having a greatly different feature value of the image itself but having a similar represented concept.