A method and system for generating a search request from a multimodal query that includes a query image and query text is provided. The multimodal query system identifies images of a collection that are textually related to the query image based on similarity between words associated with each image and the query text. The multimodal query system then selects those images of the identified images that are visually related to the query image. The multimodal query system may formulate a search request based on keywords of web pages that contain the selected images and submit that search request to a search engine service.