- Project Codename TinEye Launched in Private Beta
We not-so-quietly launched our internet-wide image search engine codenamed TinEye to our private beta testers today.
TinEye does for images what Google does for text.
Just as you are familiar with entering text in Google to find web pages that contain that text, using TinEye, you enter an image to find pages where that particular image (and modified versions of it) appears.
It’s a big step for us because our algorithms are now thousands of times more efficient than they were just a few years back. Uploading an image, and looking for matches in an index of over 487,000,000 images in real time is now a possibility. It’s something we’ve dreamed of doing for a long time, and now our beta testers are all over it.
Here are some of our favourite search results. The top image is the query image, and beneath it is the results.
Search Image
Results
Search Image
Results
Search Image
Results
- Everywhere Girl
I just stumbled upon Joey Coleman’s write up on MacLeans.ca about the Everywhere Girl and his reference to my blogpost about her. I wish I had seen his University of Manitoba blog post from 2005! Nice addition to our Everywhere Girl tracking. I haven’t seen her lately in our image identification reports since our book cover findings. I wonder if she has ever been used on a cover of a CD? We will soon find out!
- Uncle Same Wants You
We have been playing with our new image search service and doing all kinds of interesting searches. The questions in my mind is: when you do a Google image search, you typically find images that are tagged with your subject matter tag: say I am looking for “Uncle Sam” images, I find images that are tagged “Uncle Sam” or in a page with “Uncle Sam” text in close proximity to the image. Now how different would my image search results be if I used an image as the input. No tags, just an image of “Uncle Sam” and ask an image search engine to retrieve all of “Uncle Sam” images. How different would the results be?
I am betting they will be quite different. So we are continuing to play with our image search engine!
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