Big Index! Getting Bigger…

Indices…That’s what dreams are made of! Our TinEye search index is approaching 500,000,000 images; that’s half a billion folks!

Killer Kitten on TinEye
Killer Kitten on TinEye. View full size.

Half a billion may sound like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it is really just the beginning and that’s a tiny portion of all the images online today.

We are officially launching TinEye, our image identification based search engine, in a closed beta. What does this mean? You can request an invitation and servers permitting we will provide one! And you will get to play and experiment with the world’s first image identification search engine.

TinEye has been garnering great reviews already, from “the next frontier for web search” from the National Post to “indistinguishable from magic” from Jeff Barr, Amazon Evangelist to “image-recognition company that is second to none” Mathew Ingram.

You are all familiar with the Google or text-based approach to searching: insert keywords in the search field and retrieve search results. TinEye uses an image as input instead. Rather than entering text, you upload an image to TinEye or you give it an image URL. It’s that simple! TinEye then uses our search index to retrieve where your search image has appeared in all the websites that we have indexed. No small feat.

And for your viewing eyes the TinEye video: