- TinEye: the ‘go to’ search engine for images
TinEye fan Jeff left us a quick note to let us know that he spied TinEye in action over on Digg. The post in question - Awesome Spaghetti Junction, what city is this? - included the image below and the simple question:
What city is this?
How can you find out more about an image such as this one when the image is all you have? Simple. Use TinEye.com. TinEye is the only search engine able to find your exact image in over a billion images crawled from the web.
Digg user ka9dgx used TinEye to find the image in a National Geographic Traveler story about Bangkok, Thailand. TinEye also located the original image titled “The Veins of Bangkok” on Flickr, just one of the 26 different instances of this image found on the web.
And who took this shot? Trey Ratcliff, a part-time photographer that I first learned about back in August when I wrote this post about Copyright and Creative Commons. You can see more of Trey’s amazing images by visiting his blog Stuck in Customs.
Click the image below to try the TinEye search yourself and discovery where else Trey’s image has travelled online. Still need to get your TinEye account? Grab one here.
Image: Trey Ratcliff
- Search Flickr for Multicolrful Images
Our Multicolr Search Lab is the first tool on the web that enables searching by colour through 10 million creative commons images from Flickr.
Idée’s Piximilar is the technology behind the Multicolr Search Lab. While most colour search tools can only identify the dominant colour in an image, our technology allows you to choose up to 10 colours from a palette of 120 different shades (thought it can handle any colour palette imaginable).
Cameron Parkins from creativecommons.org says our Multicolr Search “is a ton of fun and a great way to find some really beautiful CC-licensed images” and Website magazine calls it “a must for bloggers, or anyone else who wants to get photos with a specific color scheme.”
Here’s an example search by blogger Aditi
You can adjust your search results by adding more of certain colours and less of others to feature your favourite colours more prominently in the images returned. Abhijeet shared our colour search tool with the readers over at makeuseof.com and demonstrated how you can dynamically search with just a few clicks.
From a selection of orange-based images…
…to the ‘pop’ and interest of oranges, greens and browns.
As you pick and choose your colours the search results automatically refresh with images that represent your new colour selections. When you click on any image it directs you to that photo on Flickr so you can learn more.
Looking for images of buildings? Try a grey-blue search combo, pulling in the colours of stone and sky.
Bryan Lee who blogs on OriginalProgram.Intermissions has a really great example of Multicolr in action with his black and purple search, below. His thoughts? “Here’s a great resource for finding color coordinated photos through Flickr. Whether you are designing and need it for storyboards, or simply want to mess around on the web, this makes for a great little web app.”
Here’s another search idea. Using bright colours and plenty of white I created a “comic book and cartoon characters” inspired search:
The combinations are endless.
- Being BOSSed around
Last month Yahoo! Search BOSS launched and since then there have been plenty of folks taking advantage of the BOSS APIs & services to product some very interesting search products. The team at Yahoo! say:
By providing deep access to Yahoo! Search’s investment in engineering, sciences and core search infrastructure and removing key usage restrictions, we are encouraging a whole new level of innovation in search experiences. We are very excited to see the diversity in products that many of you have already created.
I came across a few apps today that you might also enjoy, 123People.com is a lot of fun and I was quite impressed with their results (have a look). Vik Singh’s BOSSy Q&A is also pretty snazzy and quite amusing too, and oh yes, made with just 50 lines of code. Singh’s insider’s view on BOSS is an interesting read as well.
Yahoo! recently listed some of the most exciting apps that have been built on the BOSS search platform, here are a few of their picks below.
NewsLine — As part of the Daylife Developer Challenge, the folks from Dipity built a mashup using their timeline API, Daylife’s news API and the BOSS API. The result is a really interesting way to visualize news for any topic. Congrats to the Dipity team on winning the BOSS mashup prize!
Tianamo — Tianamo is a 3D search visualization early prototype built by Lachlan James. It maps the relationships between the search results from the BOSS API and displays them visually. To check it out, you’ll need to be running Windows with Java 1.6+.
PlayerSearch — Ted Kasten and team are building a sports search engine that pulls in content from a host of sources, including BOSS. Fantasy sports fanatics, check it out here.
You can check out more BOSS mashups here.
- See what the world is searching for
Inside Google Insights for Search: some awesome data on search term traffic. If you have not dropped by: don’t during working hours, you will have a hard time prying yourself from your screen. Here is a an example chart for cloud computing:
Interest over time:
By region:
- On the subject of search: the Petabyte Age
From Chris Anderson the editor in chief of Wired: Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
[...] The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.
Welcome to cloud computing and the world of correlations.
- Google dominance for ever? I don’t think so.
According to comScore’s latest figures, Google commanded 61.5 percent of the US search market, while Yahoo owned 20.9 percent and Microsoft trailed with 9.2 percent. Both Ask.com and AOL follow far behind the big three. Interesting opinion piece from Don Reisinger of Ars Technica but I believe he misses the point: the world of search is changing; how many of you out there use wikipedia as much as Google? I suspect the split is 50/50. Wikipedia search results are more useful than Google search results for certain searches and subject matters. Can’t believe that Don Reisinger left Wikipedia out of his op piece! That said: future search engines will succeed by doing exactly what Google has done: being relevant, simple, clean and easy to use.
These are the early days of search. Google dominance today, sure; tomorrow: not so sure.
- TinEye: Image Search Top Dog!
John Conroy’s 75 Bleeding-Edge Search Engines To Beat Google puts TinEye in the “Top Dog” slot for Image and Photo Search Engines, saying “this thing is gonna be big, boys and girls.”
- Stock Photo Help Desk Lady
It seems like data room lady has a challenger.TinEye found “stock photo help desk lady” in over 40 places on the web. You can check out the TinEye search to see all the results or request an invite if you don’t have a beta account.
Help desk lady is busy! She works for so many companies… impressive!
While she is no competition for Everywhere Girl, it’s still pretty amazing how popular this image is.
Here are some snaps of her at work.
- Taking the lead in visual search
Idée and TinEye get a nod from Tom Keenan in ‘Cloud computing a down-to-earth solution’ from last month’s Business Edge. Keenan says “Idée is definitely in the visual search-engine lead.” Yes we are!
- Search Engines for Librarians (and the rest of us)
Laura Milligan’s list of 50 Awesome Search Engines Every Librarian Should Know About is a handy resource, and not just for librarians.
Nicely organized into sub-groups such as Meta Search and Multi Search, Multimedia and Interactive, Great Niche Sites for Librarians, Custom/Reference searches and more, the post introduced me to many sites I’d never heard of.
Scirus for scientific information, GuideStar to help you find information about non-profits and Public Radio Fan for radio stations from around the world are just a few of the 50 on the list.
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