8. A computer-implemented method to access a definitive image, the method comprising: storing, in an image data store, one or more images or references to images stored in other data stores; receiving a request during a query for the definitive image that is representative of a topic of the query; maintaining an inverted index of images that maps one or more query terms to one or more images that are related to the one or more query terms; ranking one or more images identified in the inverted index that potentially match the query terms to sort the identified one or more images by a relative likelihood of being the definitive image for the topic of the query; selecting the definitive image based on one or more images returned from the inverted index, any overridden editor-chosen definitive image, and the ranking, wherein the editor-chosen definitive image is identified by manually overriding a system selected definitive image from a human editor; retrieving an image binary associated with the selected definitive image based on an image identifier associated with the selected definitive image; and sending the retrieved image binary associated with the selected definitive image in response to the received request; wherein the preceding steps are performed by at least one processor.
16. The method of claim 8 wherein retrieving the image binary comprises submitting a request to the image data store with the image identifier of the selected definitive image and receiving a response from the image data store with the image binary.