Web image retrieval is a challenging task. One central problem of web image retrieval is to rank a set of images according to how well they meet the user information need. The problem of learning to rank has inspired numerous approaches to resolve it in the text information retrieval, related work for web image retrieval, however, are still limited. We focus on the problem of learning to rank images for web image retrieval, and propose a novel ranking model, which employs a genetic programming architecture to automatically generate an effective ranking function, by combining various types of evidences in web image retrieval, including text information, image visual content features, link structure analysis and temporal information. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are capable of learning effective ranking functions for web image retrieval. Significant improvement in relevancy obtained, in comparison to some other well-known ranking techniques, in terms of MAP, NDCG@n and D@n. One problem of learning to rank the set of images according to how well they meet the user information need. We focus on the problem of learning to rank images for web image retrieval, and propose a novel ranking model, which employs a genetic programming architecture to automatically generate an effective ranking function , by combining various types of evidences in web image retrieval, including text information, image visual content features, link structure analysis and temporal information. Significant improvement in relevancy obtained, in comparison to some other well-known ranking techniques, in terms of MAP, NDCG @ n and D @ n.