Riya – a photo search company specializing with facial pattern matching have released a new product with a slightly different perspective (a major difference in business value).
The portal that came live around 12 AM (Nov 8,2006) is @ www.like.com. This seems to be one of the first portals to extensively use images as input to perform a search. Like.com takes in keywords and images to get the search results.
Though limited to a set of products currently, it is pretty interesting , to see the way u could perform ur searches. It opens up a brand new perspective to search. One could control based on the color, shape , pattern etc.
Have a look for urself. Pretty innovative and intresting.
Here is a sample text search for ‘Shoes with Wheels’. Impressive on the first look. mmm
P.S : I was personally hoping (and still wishing) Riya would improve on the facial recognition and probably provide with a offline utility to sort and categorize 10K’s of images on my local hard drive and automate tagging to a great extent. I feel Riya is in a special position to fill the void between the huge photo achieves on the local disks and the online photo services.
Update : Scoble has an interesting interview with Munjal CEO, Riya & Like @ ScoleShow. The story behind obtaining the domain name was interesting (somewhere in the initial 10 mins of the video).
Technorati Tags: images based search – riya – like – visual search
Like the Ocean 