The image-based search engine, TinEye, has been down since the weekend, but is set to relaunch this week boasting an index of over 1 billion images, double what it was when they debuted back in May.
The announcement of an increased index is the first of several developments, including an API, that the Canadian company plans to roll out over the next few weeks, according to Leila Boujnane, Chief Executive Officer of Idée Inc, the firm behind TinEye.
She says they will also launch a new service similar to Google alerts which notifies a user when a submitted picture is posted online. And tonight they are beginning testing on an iPhone application that takes an image of a CD’s album cover (from any angle and under any lighting) and brings up a page where you can purchase it on iTunes.
“Our goals are similar to Google’s goals,” she says. “And that is to index all the media that we can actually possibly index, and that’s for images and video as well.”
It’s a fairly lofty goal – with Google indexing an estimated 4 to 6 billion images at this point – and Boujnane is also aware of competitors like
Picscout.
But while Google searches images based on text, TinEye uses a user-submitted image to find similar instances online, including those that may have been altered slightly.
Idee Inc. also provides a service using similar technology for photo companies called PixID to monitor and automate syndicated image use in other papers.
Boujnane says they are currently in talks with a number of photo sites about using TinEye, including DeviantArt, which she says has expressed interest in incorporating the search directly onto its site.
This seems to make the most sense as far as how the service could successfully jump into the mainstream search market, and even more so on Flickr, where it could be a convenient way to track photo usage both out of curiosity and to monitor copyright infringement.
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