Ask YC: Unexplored Search Paradigms | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Unexplored Search Paradigms

5 pointspchristensen10 comments

In these Googlerific days, it's easy to feel like any information I could ever want is at my fingertips. Not so. The other day I was out walking with my 2 yr old and she pointed to a tree and asked what kind it was. My best answer was "Um, a big tree?" Same with flowers, dog breeds, etc.

It made me wonder if anyone is working on (whether startup or research) about visual search. I know I could look for a site showing flowers with names, but I was wondering about where I could send an image and get results. I know this is a complex computer vision and cognitive problem, I'm just curious.

Are there any other ways of searching (besides text keywords) that you wish we had?

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For your specific example of the tree, I'm only partly joking when I suggest the Audobon Field Guides. I had a bunch of them when I was a kid, and it was easy to look up a specific bird or bug or plant based only on what it looked like.

I remember reading a news story about this exact type of thing a few years ago. I can't find the article but it might have been about LeafView:

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/projects/efg/uist06-abs... http://www.cs.columbia.edu/graphics/publications/white-marin...

I have thought about this as well many times, for plant and animal identification it would be very neat to get a system like that to work.

You could try to hack it with the mechanical turk... don't know how good those people would be at this sort of thing

I know this wouldn't solve your problem, but TinEye (http://ideeinc.com/products/tineye/) fits in the "send an image and get results" paradigm.

If you google for "visual search" there seem to be a few places trying to do what you are thinking of, for example http://www.evisionglobal.com/

I messed with something neat about 2 1/2 years ago for Flickr. I saw it surface again recently:

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/

I often think about the same with audio. Finding a song by beat or chorus. I've seen something along those lines, but nothing I'd actually use yet.

Didn't Riya(now like.com) try something along these lines when they started out? The other I believe is NevenVision which google bought.

visual perception with deep learning, google movies http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416

an open-source content-based image database server is available at http://server.imgseek.net/

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