Visual Search Delivered (by Google Labs)

A while back I had argued that there was great potential for visual search now that we have a lot of images available.  Well now someone has delivered and it is Google Labs with it’s Similar Images prototype.  In fact, they did exactly what I had proposed in my original post, which was to make this a refinement to the regular search process, saying:

In fact, Google has had a close analogy in text search for a long time.  Results from a search have a link for “similar pages.”

Well now there is “similar images” and it works amazingly well.  First, I tried a search for “ball” as there many different kinds of balls.  Not all the results have a “similar images” link yet, but the ones that do produce great results.  Next, because it is near and dear to me because of Etsy, I tried a search for “ring”.  The results of exploring the “similar images” are nothing short of amazing.  Try different ring styles and you will almost always find lots more rings with a very similar basic style but lots of small variations.  I look forward to making ample usage of this.