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With the advances in multimedia databases and the popularization of the Internet, it is now possible to access large multimedia data repositories distributed throughout the world. One of the challenging problems in such an access is how the information in the respective databases can be summarized to enable an intelligent selection of relevant database sites based on visual queries. This paper presents an approach to this problem that is based on image content-based indexing of a metadatabase at a query distribution server. The metadatabase records a summary of the visual content of the images per database through image templates and statistical features characterizing the similarity value distributions of images. The selection of databases is done by searching the metadatabase using a histogram-based ranking algorithm that use query similarity to a template and the features of databases associated with the icon. The database selection mechanism have been implemented as a metaserver and extensive experiments have been done to demonstrate the eeectiveness of the database ranking algorithm.