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Comment by philsnow | Hacker News Reader

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on.

"Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

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Google never gets any credit. I used Google Now before Siri exploded the world. I listened to a machine learning series, which started like: "... applications include Facebook's facial recognition, Amazon's product recommendations, Google's image search, and Apple's self-driving car." Apple's car? Google is the world king of ML, and you gave them image search?

Thank /you/ for giving us the credit!

I personally call Google 'God of the Internet', although AWS would be a pretty good competitor for that title.

If I search Google Photos for 'dog', the top seven hits are, in order: a fuzzy toy, a possum, another picture of the same possum, a cat, a pair of goats, a sheep, and I think it's a pheasant. The dog is #8.

Of course, if I search Google Photos for 'me', the top hit is a frog, so maybe it just hates me.

Update: not any more! Now the frog is #2. The top hit if I search for 'me' is the MV Isle of Lewis car ferry, photographed on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides.

Strange, I wonder why that is. I've got nothing but dogs on the full page. The first non-dog is a dog-collar on the 9th row. I don't get the ferry, either.

filter bubble probably: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

I never used this feature until despite using Google photos extensively (I have ~60 GB of photos on there, granted that's 60 GB on my computer which isn't with the same compression/quality that Google uses). I have to say that I'm extremely impressed. it took multiple attempts to even find a mistake ("mountains", "city", "cat", "guitar", "food"). Although I was a little disappointed to find no results when I searched for "me". Being a frog is better than not existing at all.

You can add your name to a photo of yours (or any name to any photo). Google will then automatically find all of your photos. When you touch search look at the face of people that shows up below.

Interesting. I searched Google Photos for 'dog', and out of 5 results, one is my SO and I, and two are photos of my cats.

do you use google photos and/or drive regularly? Just curious if it is a training data set problem for "me"

I do use Google Photos - I set up automatic backup of the photos from my mobile phone.

It doesn't find anything for "me". I don't know what this classification is based on.

my mistake

That's something very different: this is for searching your own photos, not all those on the web. It's fairly easy to find dog photos on the web, since the web contains lots of websites with text saying something like "dog photos" and then lots of dog photos. But to find it in user-taken photos with no annotations is a relatively recent success (and is clearly not entirely there).

Wow. The search of my photos for dog is impressively bad. Everything from kids on all fours to monkeys with the rare photo of an actual dog mixed in lightly.

I'm assuming that the "I am not a robot" image captchas are being used as a massive source of training data. I've notice there are several tiers of question:

* Select the images containing a street sign

* Select the squares in an image containing a street sign

* Draw a polygon around the sign

Someone better informed than me might be able to comment on how that fits in to deep learning strategies.

Almost certainly those are signs from Street View images.

That contributes to Google Maps - and accurate map data could have obvious value for self-driving cars.

Guy who invented it did a TED talk. Eventually used it to help translate books. Have noticed that it went to street addresses and now identifying stores, signs, and trees. So most likely for mapping applications.

Google has been leveraging people through captchas to do what computers are not good at for as long as google has been doing captchas.

same in iOS, you can search your photos like that.

Actually, if you looked at the source on facebook, you could see photos being tagged with things like "one person, two people, smiles"

If you turn on VoiceOver on iOS (accessibility feature for the blind) and then tap on photos on the Photos app, it will read out whatever it found in that photo

The iOS version doesn't work very well for me. It often uses the location of when the picture was stored. If you receive a picture from someone showing Big Ben while you're in New York, it'll show the picture when you search for new york. So searching for places doesn't really work, searching in contents also seems to be much worse than Google.

Another point where Apple apparently lags behind in the AI game.

I found that both the Google and iOS versions could perform much the same sort of searches (e.g. "cat", "house") with roughly similar outcomes. However, Apple chooses to censor some searches (nothing illegal or dodgy, of course) and I could obtain no results for these despite having images which Google could find.

As an addendum, I have two kids, and the google photos recognition rate for them is astonishing. They're ~2 years apart and google photos never confuses pictures of the older one with pictures of the younger one taken ~2 years later, for instance.

And in EU, the most useful feature face recognition, doesn't work because Google is afraid if privacy laws. After all the data I have given them suddenly the data I do want to give is kit possible.

I think the idea here is to find things by analyzing the pictures directly as opposed to just searching contextual data like captions and link text. No idea if Google does that or not.

Edit: Didn't know Google Photos was a thing and assumed parent meant Google Images. Carry on.

I don't think you understood what GP said: he is using Google Photos, which searches his private collection. Not Google images.

I personally find Google Photos usually helpful and use it all the time to locate specific pictures. I do not caption them at all

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