Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a technique for images retrieval based on their visual features, i.e. induced by their pixels. The images are, classically, described by the image feature vectors. Those vectors reflect the texture, color or a combination of them. The accuracy of the CBIR system is highly influenced by the (i) definition of the image feature vector describing the image, (ii) indexing and (iii) retrieval process. In this paper, we propose a new CBIR system entitled ISE (Image Search Engine). Our ISE system defines the optimum combination of color and texture features as an image feature vector, including the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and employing an Interactive Genetic Approach (GA) for the indexing process. The performance analysis shows that our suggested PCM (Proposed Combination Method) upgrades the average precision metric from 66.6% to 89.30% for the “Food” category color histogram, from 77.7% to 100% concerning CCVs (Color Coherence Vectors) for the “Flower” category and from 58% to 87.65% regarding the DCD (Dominant Color Descriptor) for the “Building” category using the Corel dataset. Besides, our ISE system showcases an average precision of 98.23%, which is significantly higher than other CBIR systems presented in related works.