December 4, 2008
TinEye’s reverse image search
I’m very proud that a photo that I snapped with my cellphone on a London sidewalk (and that I posted in this blog) is the fourth hit you get when you do a Google image search for “comb over”.
Now TinEye lets me feed in the photo’s URL and see the other places where it’s been used. You can even give upload the photo itself. TinEye spiders the Web, creating a hash for the images it finds, and then compares the search “term” to the hash. Of course this can be used to track down Violators, but it could also be useful to get more information about an image. The site’s “cool searches” page has some examples of searches that are, well, somewhat cool and that give a sense of the search engine’s tolerance for variations. (Thanks to Michael O’Conner Clarke for the link.)
