

Us: Customizable visual search. YC: Wait, what? Why customizable? - ksolanki
http://linkapic.com/blog/2011/04/linkapic-customizable-visual-search/

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anigbrowl
You need a little animated video. Or at least pictures of what it does.
Although I read the FAQ and all the pages on your blog, I'm having difficulty
understanding if this is an add-on to a mapping application, or something like
that Color app that was famous for 15 minutes a few weeks ago, or...well, I'm
just confused about exactly what it does, and not curious enough to spend time
trying to figure it out. I'm guessing PG and others at YC didn't reject you as
such, they just weren't able to work out what it's for.

I hope that doesn't come off as harsh. It's a common problem on landing pages,
in FAQs, and in documentation; people forget to begin with short, clear
statements that answer the questions: what is this for? why does that matter?
How do I do something cool with it?

I remember spending most of an afternoon many years ago trying to wrap my head
around TeX, and eventually losing interest because Microsoft Word's equation
editor seemed an awful lot easier for anyone short of a typesetting
professional. The documentation seemed to say 'go away and leave me alone.'

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ksolanki
Hey, thanks for your insightful comment. I agree we should have a video of
what it could do. Will have that up soon.

The idea is to do more or less what Google Goggles does, but where users
contribute to the content. We will use Flickr et al to initialize the database
of searchable places in the world.

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jayzee
So basically: 1\. A content creator takes photos of objects and tags them
(links, texts whatever) 2\. I take photos of those places and linkapic shows
me what the content creator tagged those photos (objects) with.

Right?

I think that a twist to your idea might be interesting. Say Content Crator
tags objects/photos. The way you have it now I have to take a photo of the
same object to see the tag. Instead how about that if I am walking around you
can show me nearby tagged images based on GPS.

There would be more discovery for me and less work. Taking photos of things
and then waiting to see the notes sounds like work. But walking down the
street and seeing interesting things that other people have taken photos of in
the vicinity and tagged becomes interesting.

And it can be a tour because one tag can have directions to the next object
etc.

\--- A side note: The discussion in your blog is meandering in my opinion
(SEO/democracy etc) and the point is not well made. It would be best to just
stick to the basic use case w/o pitching/marketing as pg likes to say.

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ksolanki
You did get the basic idea -- content creators can basically make a world
around them visually searchable. Say, a University or zoo can link their
buildings or exhibits to more information. Any visitor can then look it up.

The twist that you mention seems interesting -- we were planning to add a
feature that would let users discover tags nearby, as well as "related" (say,
a user snaps a winery, he/she can see other wineries nearby). The original
idea behind snapping a picture to search was to give a higher degree or
precision, so users can get answers to "What is this building?" or "What is
this statue?".

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ksolanki
Here is a part story of what we learned from our YC interview, and how
(thankfully) PG and team made us think hard about our assumptions. The rest of
the post is about what came out.

