We have been playing with our new image search service and doing all kinds of interesting searches. The questions in my mind is: when you do a Google image search, you typically find images that are tagged with your subject matter tag: say I am looking for “Uncle Sam” images, I find images that are tagged “Uncle Sam” or in a page with “Uncle Sam” text in close proximity to the image. Now how different would my image search results be if I used an image as the input. No tags, just an image of “Uncle Sam” and ask an image search engine to retrieve all of “Uncle Sam” images. How different would the results be?
I am betting they will be quite different. So we are continuing to play with our image search engine!
During my travels on the intertubes, I have a had a bad habit of collecting images I think are interesting. I drag images off of web pages and into my “unsorted” pictures folder which I check out every year or so for a laugh. The only thing that’s bad about this habit is that unlike a bookmark, there’s rarely context associated with an image file. There is rarely metadata about the images and filenames often provides no clues as to the source of the image. During my annual pictures folder perusal, I rediscovered this really inventive lamp design. I must have saved it from a web page but I don’t remember which one.
