Abstract: Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to functions used for retrieving image results based on search queries. More specifically, image search queries can be pre-grouped or classified based on visual and semantic similarity. For example, a pairwise image similarity value for a pair of queries can be computed based on one or more of the sum of all of the overlapping the image results, the sum of the image distances between all of the pairs of images in the image results, and the rank of each of the images in the image results. The pairwise image similarity values can then be used to generate image query clusters. Each image query clusters can include a set of queries with high pairwise image similarity values. In some examples, a distance function can be determined for each image query cluster. This data can be used to provide image results.