Microsoft’s Meenaz Merchant, Senior Program Manager at Bing, posted a behind the scenes look at why Bing is a better image search engine than Google. Here are the seven examples on scenarios on why Bing is better than Google with image search, as described on the Bing blog. (1) Entity Understanding – Bing says while […]
Google now lets you search your private photos and the photos your friends on Google+ share with you. All you need to do is search on Google for keywords such as [my photos] or [my photos sunset] to bring up matching photos. You can even search for your friend’s photos such as [danny’s photos sunset] or […]
Earlier this week at its Inside Search event, Google announced a new way to search the web called Search By Image. Rather than enter a text query, Search By Image lets you begin your search with an image and Google will (try to) tell you what it is and show visually similar images. Search By […]
Google has announced a trio of updates to Goggles, its visual search tool that analyzes mobile photos and provides (hopefully) matching search results/information about the image. Since the search results don’t always match the image — “visual recognition is still a complicated task,” Google’s blog post explains — one of the upgrades involves a way […]
Earlier this week Google launched offline product inventory for Google Shopping/Product Search. And this morning the company is going live with the decidedly un-Googly Boutiques.com. On the surface Boutiques may resemble other “social shopping” sites such as Polyvore or Stylehive, among others. But the underlying technology, I’m told, is much more sophisticated than comparable female-centric […]
A grad student and his professor have developed software that eliminates (some) people from Google Street View images. And that could be a boon to Google’s ongoing battles over Street View and privacy. Arturo Flores, a computer science grad student at UC San Diego, and Serge Belongie, his professor, have published their findings (1.7mb PDF) […]
The Google Search Evolution event today featured a fair amount of discussion of the impact of mobile on the future direction of search and the user experience. There was a flurry of announcements about mobile products and feature upgrades, summarized on the Google Mobile Blog. Danny live-blogged the event. Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering, […]
Google Goggles, which I wrote about this morning, is actually now live at google.com/mobile/goggles. The Google Mobile Blog announced it, saying: In a nutshell, Goggles lets users search for objects using images rather than words. Simply take a picture with your phone’s camera, and if we recognize the item, Goggles returns relevant search results. Right […]
When I was watching the CNBC Inside the Mind of Google, Google revealed a ‘secret’ project under the cover at Google named “Google Goggles.” Google Goggles is new search feature Google is working on that allows searchers to take a picture and ask Google, what is this picture about. Basically a way to snap a […]
Six months ago, Google released an image search labs project that allowed you to search by similarity within image search. Google announced that they have promoted that labs project as a default feature in Google Image Search. Now when you search on Google Images, you may often find a link under the image that says, […]
When most of us travel, we like to visit famous landmarks in the area we’re touring. It’s easy to find famous landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramid, but can be difficult to find lesser known sites. And for armchair travelers, it can take time to search for images of landmarks even with […]
Microsoft’s innovative Photosynth technology has been integrated into Virtual Earth, marking the first time Photosynth has been available for commercial use. Photosynth is a tool that lets users upload regular photos and then stitches those photos into 3-D scenes of whatever the photos depict. Our Greg Sterling has previously shown some Photosynth screenshots and called […]
Google has introduced a new experimental refinement tool that lets you click a “similar images” link beneath image search results and see a new screen of images with similar color, shape and other visual elements. The new tool has been released in Google Labs and isn’t yet available in standard image search results. The similar […]
Live Search announced you can now use images to find similar images in Live Image Search. To use this feature, you go to Live Image Search, search for an image, hover over an image, and click on “show similar images.”
I’m generally not given to hyperbole or breathless enthusiasm when writing about a new search service. Quite the opposite, in fact—over the decade I’ve covered search I’ve seen so many so-called “radically new” approaches that are simply updates or spins on existing technologies that I’ve grown a bit jaded. But not after seeing a demo […]
Microsoft’s Photosynth is morphing from a Microsoft Live Labs experiment — featured on the BBC’s “How We Built Britain” television series and in select other rarefied contexts — to what can only be described as a “totally cool” consumer application.
Beet.TV interviewed R.J. Pittman, Google’s Director of Product Management for Consumer Search Properties, about image search. The video is below, but here is my short summary of the interview. Pittman said Image Search has huge growth opportunity for Google. Google explained that text doesn’t always describe the image, so they use other techniques. They use […]
A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search from the New York Times covers a new research paper (PDF format) from Google that talks about a way of ranking images based on analyzing "visual links" between them.
Google Operating System reports on a new video search engine from Reuters that uses face recognition technology developed by Viewdle to find people in videos. Riya, which became, Like, uses similar “visual search” technology applied to product search. The Reuters engine only yields Reuters video results — at least for now. From a certain end […]
“Image search” is really something of a misnomer, because current generation search engines rely primarily on text to “understand” all types of content, including images. When you search for images on Google, Flickr or most other search engines, they aren’t examining the pixels that make up images. Instead, search engines look for clues that might […]
I got a press release today from Polar Rose, a new company promising to bring facial recognition technology to those seeking images from across the web. In other words, want to find all the pictures of Bill Clinton? Polar Rose says it will make it happen through a browser plug-in that works with existing photo […]