

Google Search By Image - tilt
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/google-search-by-image-use-a-snapshot-as-your-search-query/

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Pewpewarrows
TinEye and Google Goggles applied to the entire Internet? Yes please. I can't
wait to play around with this.

What will be even more interesting is if they release an API for it in the
future. Sites like imgur and reddit could then suggest if you're uploading or
submitting a similar image to one that already exists.

~~~
wccrawford
I just tried TinEye (hadn't heard of it before) and it appears to only look
for images that are modifications of the image being searched for.

I wonder if Google's will work the same, or if it will be possible to find
other images that are similar, but not based on the same image? That's what I
really want.

~~~
ch0wn
Here's an interesting article about image hashing and fingerprinting
algorithms:
[http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Loo...](http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Looks-
Like-It.html)

~~~
safeaim
Everything from that blog is interesting, do you or anyone else got any
suggestions for similar blogs?

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BoppreH
I use TinEye a lot and I think this will be great. My typical uses of TinEye,
that will probably be improved with the bigger stock:

\- somebody put text over a nice image and I want the unmodified version

\- searching for bigger, better quality versions of an image (e.g. wallpapers)

\- finding other images from the same author/gallery (since it links to the
sites that hosts the copies)

\- finding the name of the movie, person or object pictured (because copies
will be hosted with different, probably meaningful names and in pages with
subtitles)

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blauwbilgorgel
Though I do sometimes use these services, since a few years I block these
spiders on my own sites and those of clients.

Often this would happen: Client or user finds an image through Google Image
Search on another blog or website, with unclear copyright. Then the client or
user would upload this to the server. Then the client, or me, would receive a
letter from a (GettyImages) lawyer: If we would please pay for the full
licensing right of that 160x160 pixel image.

Thinking about it, I find accommodating to these services can lead to nothing
but trouble: Either legal trouble, or hit-and-run users stealing your images,
because you paid for higher resolution.

I hope I can separately block this Google service from Google Image Search.
Although Google Image Search isn't as good to webmasters as it used to be
(especially for those that rely on advertisement clicks) and the users it can
send can be negligible: Ranking higher in Google Image Search seems to
correlate to ranking higher in Google Web Search.

If it is part and parcel of Google Image Search, I might reconsider my
robots.txt directive for Googlebot-Image. They just now opened this up for the
public, but it is likely they are already using this internally to gauge
(media) quality factors on-page.

P.S.: It would be interesting to see what happens when Google doesn't partner
up with GettyImages or iStockPhoto, like in the early days of TinEye you could
abuse that service to find the same stock images without watermarks, on the
sites of people that already paid for that image.

P.P.S.: Now you can add RDFa or Microdata to mark up your images with a
copyright statement, what would happen to sites that host copyrighted images,
tagged "not for reproduction"? Google should be able to find the canonical
image and "punish" those that don't comply with its copyright.

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dmix
From my understanding, TinEye makes money from corporate B2B deals. Their
consumer product is mostly just a technology demo/marketing piece rather than
a part of their core business.

So they probably don't have much to worry about.

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cpeterso
Retrievr is a prototype of a similar idea: search for Flickr photos by drawing
(or uploaded image).

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

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tilt
From QAs: it won't perform face recognition

~~~
GMali
It actually should. Probably put FBI out of business too.

~~~
jnhnum1
Clearly it's not being omitted for technical reasons.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/facial-
recognition-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/facial-recognition-
google_n_869583.html)

~~~
apu
Maybe what Schmidt said about Google's intentions was true, but another reason
they haven't done it is because _it's not possible right now_ , or at least
not in a fully-automated way across most images on the web. The state-of-the-
art on the easier "verification" problem ("are these two images of the same
person?") are shown here: <http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>

The best results are under 90% accuracy, which sounds pretty good, until you
realize that random chance is 50%, and for recognition ("who is this
person?"), you're essentially exponentiating that 90% by the number of
different people you want to recognize.

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iansinke
This reminds me of apps like Shazam. While they definitely serve an amazing
purpose (recognizing songs by finding a similar region of sound) what I would
really like is an app that could recognize my humming a song--which probably
sounds nothing like the actual song itself (different key, speed, entirely
different voice, etc.)

~~~
skimbrel
Check out SoundHound: <http://www.soundhound.com/>

It does exactly what you ask for.

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derobert
I wonder if this is based on the search-by-image that Google Goggles (on
Android) already does.

~~~
krisw
Either way, hopefully they've improved it - I was never able to get Goggles to
work very well at all (versus TinEye).

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tilt
From QAs: submitted images will be treated like any other query and they'll
stay private

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itswindy
Rightheaven clones jump from joy :)

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damonpace
Love this! But I really only see a mobile use for this, rather than a desktop
use.

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antihero
I wonder how it'll compare with TinEye.

~~~
tropin
Easy, indepently of how good is, just trying to fight against Google resources
will crush TinEye. Today must be a terrible day for them.

~~~
guyzero
Idee's business model has little to do with TinEye. They're probably not very
worried.

