Current search engines crawl the Web, download content, and digest this content locally. For multimedia content, this involves considerable volumes of data. Furthermore, this process covers only publicly available content because content providers are concerned that they otherwise loose control over the distribution of their intellectual property. We present the prototype of our secure and distributed search engine, which dynamically pushes content based feature extraction to image providers. Thereby, the volume of data that is transported over the network is significantly reduced, and the concerns mentioned above are alleviated. The distribution of feature extraction and matching algorithms is done by mobile software agents. We give a description of the search engine’s architecture, quantitative evaluation results, a discussion of related security issues, and a summary of a simulation study in which our retrieval system was evaluated in an electronic commerce scenario from the per...