Just came across Idée’s new baby, TinEye. Have you ever wondered why it is that you can’t just go to google images (or similar image search engine) and look for images based on image content and not tags, names and such. Well it’s because it’s damn hard to do and frankly until now I haven’t seen one that actually worked properly. That said, I think the guys at TinEye have it figured out quite nicely. Their system does NOT use keywords, text, names or tags. They have developed a proprietary image identification technology that creates a image finger print for a given image. This allows them to do amazing partial matches, even if the image has been cropped, resized or modified. Although their database of images is not as large at google, their algorithms run circles around pretty much every other technology in this field.
If you don’t believe me head over to tineye.com, sign up for a e-vite and once you get invited get a beta account and try it out. You’ll be amazed and how cool this technology is. They even have a firefox plugin :-).