Due to the importance of searching for an image in a database in various applications, many algorithms have been proposed to identify the contents of the image. Algorithms that identify the content of the image as a whole can offer good results in some applications and fail to produce satisfactory results in other applications. Therefore, searching for an object inside the image was used to overcome the limitations of identifying the image as a whole. Hence, studies focused on segmenting the image into small sub-images and identified their contents. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm inspired by human attention and utilises the saliency principles to identify the contents of an image and search for similar objects in the images stored in a database. We also demonstrate that the use of salient objects produces better and more accurate results in the image retrieval process. A new retrieval algorithm is therefore presented here, focused on identifying the objects extracted from the salient regions. To assess the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a new evaluation method is also proposed which considers the order of the retrieved image in assessing the efficiency of the algorithm.