13. A method performed by an image search engine to perform an image search, the method comprising the steps of: receiving an original search string from a server input; determining whether a thesaurus-based approach or a dictionary-based approach is selected; in response to determining that a thesaurus-based approach is selected: sending various queries out through an output of the image search engine to receive additional user input from a server input, the additional user input allowing the image search engine to select augmenting information from a hierarchical database within storage associated with the image search engine where that augmenting information can be used to augment the original search string into an augmented search string; performing a search of image databases using the augmented search string to generate a list of image search results from the image databases that correlate favorably with the augmented search string; and providing image search result information to an output of the server; in response to determining that that a dictionary-based approach is selected, parsing at least one dictionary word from the original search string; using the at least one dictionary word to access a dictionary database that finds related words for the at least one dictionary word, and using the related words to generate an augmented search string; performing a search of image databases using the augmented search string to generate a list of image search results from the image databases that correlate favorably with the augmented search string; and providing image search result information to an output of the server.
13. A method performed by an image search engine to perform an image search, the method comprising the steps of: receiving an original search string from a server input; determining whether a thesaurus-based approach or a dictionary-based approach is selected; in response to determining that a thesaurus-based approach is selected: sending various queries out through an output of the image search engine to receive additional user input from a server input, the additional user input allowing the image search engine to select augmenting information from a hierarchical database within storage associated with the image search engine where that augmenting information can be used to augment the original search string into an augmented search string; performing a search of image databases using the augmented search string to generate a list of image search results from the image databases that correlate favorably with the augmented search string; and providing image search result information to an output of the server; in response to determining that that a dictionary-based approach is selected, parsing at least one dictionary word from the original search string; using the at least one dictionary word to access a dictionary database that finds related words for the at least one dictionary word, and using the related words to generate an augmented search string; performing a search of image databases using the augmented search string to generate a list of image search results from the image databases that correlate favorably with the augmented search string; and providing image search result information to an output of the server. 16. The method of claim 13 wherein the image search engine performs image search operations using context derived from one of a thesaurus database or a dictionary database to create the augmented search string, and performs image search operations based on the augmented search string.