I never thought that I would see TinEye and Jacques Derrida mentioned in the same sentence. This is awesome! I still remember late night conversations about Derrida’s work… his books are still on my bookshelves but I have to admit that I have not pulled them out in years! Nonetheless Alejandro in Amsterdam has a little write up about TinEye and how TinEye is really an image search engine to spot the differences in images or photographs. Correct! TinEye spots the difference.
I need to bring up a couple of corrections to Alejandro’s post: TinEye has now indexed 901 million images and not 487 million images it also does not directly compete with text search engines such as Google, AltaVista or Yahoo. It is in a category of its own: the image search category using image identification (or recognition) technologies. Of course you can use Google, Yahoo or any other search engine to search for images but what TinEye really answers are two simple questions: where has an image appeared and how has it been used; and it does that using image recognition. TinEye does not replace keyword searching, it actually enhances it and is an additional search method that can yield better results than text searching because TinEye can index an image even when there are no keywords associated with the image or no keywords in the proximity of the image.
So back to work, because TinEye is not going to get better by itself!
