

Ask YC: Unexplored Search Paradigms - pchristensen

In these Googlerific days, it's easy to feel like any information I could ever want is at my fingertips.  Not so.  The other day I was out walking with my 2 yr old and she pointed to a tree and asked what kind it was.  My best answer was "Um, a big tree?"  Same with flowers, dog breeds, etc.<p>It made me wonder if anyone is working on (whether startup or research) about visual search.  I know I could look for a site showing flowers with names, but I was wondering about where I could send an image and get results.  I know this is a complex computer vision and cognitive problem, I'm just curious.<p>Are there any other ways of searching (besides text keywords) that you wish we had?
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thaumaturgy
For your specific example of the tree, I'm only partly joking when I suggest
the Audobon Field Guides. I had a bunch of them when I was a kid, and it was
easy to look up a specific bird or bug or plant based only on what it looked
like.

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rplevy
I remember reading a news story about this exact type of thing a few years
ago. I can't find the article but it might have been about LeafView:

[http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/efg/uist06-abs...](http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/efg/uist06-abstract-
final.pdf) [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-
marin...](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-marino-
feinerCHI07.pdf)

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ejs
I have thought about this as well many times, for plant and animal
identification it would be very neat to get a system like that to work.

You could try to hack it with the mechanical turk... don't know how good those
people would be at this sort of thing

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paulgb
I know this wouldn't solve your problem, but TinEye
(<http://ideeinc.com/products/tineye/>) fits in the "send an image and get
results" paradigm.

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gcheong
If you google for "visual search" there seem to be a few places trying to do
what you are thinking of, for example <http://www.evisionglobal.com/>

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justindz
I messed with something neat about 2 1/2 years ago for Flickr. I saw it
surface again recently:

<http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/>

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dnaquin
I often think about the same with audio. Finding a song by beat or chorus.
I've seen something along those lines, but nothing I'd actually use yet.

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prakash
Didn't Riya(now like.com) try something along these lines when they started
out? The other I believe is NevenVision which google bought.

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globalrev
visual perception with deep learning, google movies
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416>

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rnc000
an open-source content-based image database server is available at
<http://server.imgseek.net/>

