+ An Introduction to Like.com (Visual Similarity Search)
Danny Sullivan introduces Like, a shopping engine that helps find visually similar products. This product comes from Riya.com, another company in the space. A quick note to point out that visual search in one of several ways has been going on for years. Cobion (now defunct), LTU Technologies from France amongst them. We’ve blogged about many of them on ResourceShelf over the years. Here’s a list of a few, with some demos and papers from conferences.

1) If you’re looking for more visual search try these:
CogniSign and xcavator

2) Vima Technologies
Check out this demo from the Media Bakery Stock Footage.
Over 750,000 images. Overview here.

Media Bakery began offering a new search technology that allows users to sort their stock photo search results based on thousands of visual clues in an image. The initiative was launched in response to a critical need for better search strategies that enable stock photo buyers to locate the most appropriate image in a large database more easily. The new technology augments traditional keyword searching by utilizing the right-brained visual function of the photo researcher.

It works better than keywords alone when searching for concepts, moods, colors, or specific layout options. Visual search takes full advantage of the right-brain intuitive, the inherent strength of most creative people. Visual search actually re-sorts the keyworded results bringing the best visual matches right to the top. One click provides positive results for many concepts. Images that are not chosen provide information too. Consolidated feedback from multiple images quickly finds all the desirable images and cuts down significantly on search time. “Media Bakery is the largest stock photo site to offer their customers the power of visual search. Considering they have over 750,000 images, visual search will likely save each of their clients a minimum of 10-20 minutes per search…”

3) LTU Technologies
French company around for many years.
Demo here combining metadata and visual similarity:
corbis.ltutech.com/

4) Report: Organising personal pictures with content analysis technology
From the 2004 meeting. PDF file.

5) Finding the Right Image in the Corbis Collection
From the 2003 meeting. PDF file.

6) Freenet.de from Germany
Note how you can limit to a human face.

7) Cydral
Offline at the moment but background

+ Yahoo Bookmarks Go International

+ Developers: New Web API’s for AIM

+ Notess on Follow That Page: 100 Free Pages Tracked
If Greg says it’s worthy of your attention, it is. That said, around ResourceShelf and DocuTicker we are big fans of Website-Watcher which continues to improve with every release and has a one-time fee. One service not on Greg’s compilation that we also find worthy is Trackle. It costs $15/month. Not as powerful as the others, but it’s dependable and you can try it free for two weeks.

+ Google Has Published Their Official 10-Q With the SEC

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 5:39 am and is filed under Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.