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Google Launches Search By Image
kai_hiwatari writes "At the Inside Search event being held at San Francisco, Google has announced a new addition to its search features — Search by Image. The Search by Image feature is something like Google's image search application for mobile devices — Google Goggles — but for the desktop."
Have gnu, will travel.
Great article. Not only does it get "TinEye" wrong (Tiny Eye? Really?) but it also fails to link to Google.
It's supposed to be part of images.google.com, although it's not working for me currently (the camera icon doesn't show up in the search box). There's help on how to use this feature here.
Do they keep the image and add it to their collection or do they toss it away?
There is a major difference between the new Google Image Search and TinEye:
Some background: Running a service like TinEye costs a lot of money. How do they do it for free?
TinEye has a major business besides free image-matching for the public. They provide private image-matching services for stock-photo sites like Getty Images (not saying the Getty uses them, but they could.)
The stock-photo site loads their entire collection into TinEye and TinEye finds everyone who is using the picture or a derivative of it. Then the photo site can sue the people who do not have a license to use an image.
Google's search is about extracting information from the image to give you other related pieces of information, not where on the internet you can find the same image.
TinyEye only searches for exact image matches (including cropping, size and color changes), which has some use if you stumble across an image and want to find its origin or look for people who might violate your copyright. Google search seems to go further and search for the actual thing on the image, not just the image itself.
And suddenly the internets cried out in pain as the simultaneous upload of a billion boobie pics strained its' tubes to the core.
I think you mean "higher resolution versions of images you already have"
Google's search is about extracting information from the image to give you other related pieces of information, not where on the internet you can find the same image.
Actually, Google's search is about extracting ad views from its users.
This isn't search based on facial recognition, but on product recognition, or so it seems from what I've read so far. It will be interesting when you can point Google at a picture of someone and have it search for other pictures of the same person. Then check to see if you get different results with safe-search off.
That may be the case this week, but with facial recognition already built into Picasa (and it works fairly well) and with other companies (facebook) threatening to unleash it on the web, we can only guess how long Google can hold off a full fledged facial reco system, at least for public figures, and probably with an opt-in, but eventually for any face at all.
The tools are there already. The privacy issue and their often mocked clinging to the "don't be evil" motto is probably the only thing preventing google from offering a FR application tomorrow,
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Google had the same functionality as TinEye in Google Labs for at least as long as TinEye has been around. They (weakly) integrated it into their main site in 2009 as a "Find Similar Images" feature. Google goggles (and this) does a lot more than TinEye, because it can find different images with similar content, while TinEye only finds the same image with minor cropping and filtering applied. And academia has been publishing papers on images search for years before either company made anything.
The difference is that TinEye found a niche business model for the (relatively) simple image search that it had, and developed it into a very useful tool for the limited capability it had. Google on the other hand, decided what they had wasn't good enough for their market, and kept working on it in the background until it was good enough.
Neither is a rip off of the other. They are just different approaches to different problems, both of which borrowed from prior research as well as adding their own improvements.
The other day I fed TinEye a highly-cropped version of a photo, someone's avatar from a game that I half-recognized. It found the uncropped version, and a few alternate versions (not exact matches, but same subject, different paintings).
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Yep, because Google was the first search engine ever.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
That's a beautiful story.
Too bad that it depends on the fairy-story of well-vetted certificate authorities and/or DNS integrity, etc.
Have fun!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Commenting on the assertion:
"can only be transmitted by sender and received by intended receiver"
That is a statement that almost implies SSL in mutual authenticated mode, which is between static entities. Outside of that context, the statement still represents SSL in a way that is misleading. It encourages a greater level of trust in the technology than warranted - which tends to result in a user's relaxed vigilance.
Wifi was barely conceived of, when SSL was first proposed by Netscape - let alone public access points! I can sit in Starbucks and broker SSL sessions all day long, with a couple of pieces of open-source kit.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I uploaded a photo of mine--not available on the net--and Google showed me six photos that are visually similar with differing subjects. I like it.
My hope for the future is that a photo I take of some unusual connector will return info on what it fits. Similarly I would like to identify other objects through their photos when they lack other info such as model numbers.