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.
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