Google Launches Search By Image 109
kai_hiwatari writes "At the Inside Search event being held at San Francisco, Google has announced a new addition to its search features — Search by Image. The Search by Image feature is something like Google's image search application for mobile devices — Google Goggles — but for the desktop."
Do they keep your image? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do they keep the image and add it to their collection or do they toss it away?
Re:tineye.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Some background: Running a service like TinEye costs a lot of money. How do they do it for free?
TinEye has a major business besides free image-matching for the public. They provide private image-matching services for stock-photo sites like Getty Images (not saying the Getty uses them, but they could.)
The stock-photo site loads their entire collection into TinEye and TinEye finds everyone who is using the picture or a derivative of it. Then the photo site can sue the people who do not have a license to use an image.
Google's search is about extracting information from the image to give you other related pieces of information, not where on the internet you can find the same image.
Not copying (Score:5, Interesting)
Google had the same functionality as TinEye in Google Labs for at least as long as TinEye has been around. They (weakly) integrated it into their main site in 2009 as a "Find Similar Images" feature. Google goggles (and this) does a lot more than TinEye, because it can find different images with similar content, while TinEye only finds the same image with minor cropping and filtering applied. And academia has been publishing papers on images search for years before either company made anything.
The difference is that TinEye found a niche business model for the (relatively) simple image search that it had, and developed it into a very useful tool for the limited capability it had. Google on the other hand, decided what they had wasn't good enough for their market, and kept working on it in the background until it was good enough.
Neither is a rip off of the other. They are just different approaches to different problems, both of which borrowed from prior research as well as adding their own improvements.