Cool searches from TinEye, the image search engine by idée

As TinEye, an image powered search engine builds its image library, its beta users are beginning to see the power and usefulness of it all.  Even with a relatively small index of a half billion images, some very cool search results have been shared by TinEye’s loyal users base, as Heather Williams points out on the idée blog today.

The software, developed by idée (pronounced e-day) for the web, has Firefox and Internet Explorer plug-ins to make searching easier.  To compare any online image to TinEye’s quickly growing database, a user only has to right-click any image on the web (or upload their own) and let TinEye do the rest.

Using super fancy algorithms, TinEye’s software is able to “fingerprint” the image and compare it to its indexed database of images, enabling extremely accurate and extremely fast image matching to occur, even in cases where images have been heavily modified.

Back in the age of dinosaurs (you know, 1995), stock photography companies would embed a digital “watermark” to track their photos, but even slight manipulation, cropping, or rotating could render the watermark ineffective.

This is not the case for TinEye however… where the eye sees what the eye sees.

Although the service is still in beta and their index of images is small, TinEye users have been testing the software and found some really cool searches, such as the ones you see here.

To learn more about TinEye and the cool technology being developed by the brilliant folks at idée, check out their website at http://www.idee.com or idée blog at http://blog.ideeinc.com.