Unofficial Google Image Search by Drawing (or Webcam)

[franze]

http://search-by-drawing.franz-enzenhofer.com/

[garethsprice]

Fun idea, but what are the potential use cases? The results seem quite random, even the same image drawn slightly differently returns wildly different results.

Tried finding logos with it (http://bit.ly/mOHZjx, http://bit.ly/rpHUOC), smiley face (http://bit.ly/p9EqV6), Piet Mondrian (http://bit.ly/pSxzap) and schoolboy's favorites (http://bit.ly/pYMeV6 http://bit.ly/nr7wxf) with no joy.

Anyone got it to find anything they specifically asked for?

Edit: Last two NSFW if you work in a preschool or something.

[petercooper]

One of my favorite papers from over the years is Fast Multiresolution Image Querying: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/query/ .. which, on the surface, demonstrates how you could make an entire system like this for yourself. It's from the mid 90s! Direct link to the PDF at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/query/mrquery.pdf

I seem to recall Nat Friedman was working on this sort of "image search by drawing" stuff in a popular Linux photo app in the mid 00s but I'm still looking for the citation.

[brackin]

Very interesting although all what shows for me is Logos because I cannot draw anything but stick figures on a mac touchpad.

[5partan]

Kinda poor, it doesn't really matter what you draw, the search results are nearly identical for each color

[wgx]

Got some very bizarre results, none of which really matched anything I drew.

I suspect this is more down to Google's image matching than your tool though!

Example: http://imgur.com/PvIFT

[tripzilch]

Does Google Search By Image not work in Opera or something?

The whole drawing part seems to work just fine, it then redirects me to Google where it's supposed to do Search By Image but I just get the Google Front page?

[franze → tripzilch]

it's a bug on googles side, it's reported here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=... would be cool if you add "opera too" to the bug report. thx.

[VMG]

This seems to be the only one type of search that yields the expected results: http://goo.gl/HEgdG

Still interesting though

[sp332]

Excellent use of Google's "search by image" feature! https://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html

[altrego99]

Needs undo.

[VMG]

dead (doesn't load)

[franze → VMG]

heroku logs says everything is (still) ok

[VMG → franze]

it's fine now