Riya has lauched their visual search engine Like.com, which empowers consumers to find items by their appearance, not only text. The method used at this time is pictures of celebrities wearing various products.
"A picture is worth a thousand words, and it is much easier to shop and search by clicking on pictures than by typing complex search terms," said company CEO and co-founder, Munjal Shah. "Like.com is the first major new innovation to come to the world of image search in the last five years. Now, web searchers will no longer have to rely on the tags that may or may not be attached to a given photo or product image."
For some people I could see this really being a fun way to search and find products. One of the problems I see with it is that when I went to check it out, I clicked on one of the shoe products and it came up with over 4,000 items in that one color.
What is going to happen when an almost uncountable number of products in one color alone are brought up like text is in today's search?
Still, the connection with celebrity pictures, visual search results and ability to search in price ranges, should make this a hit with those that love to window shop.
It should be fun for some and do well. It's one of those things that really haven't had much comparison to measure by, so it should be interesting to see where it goes.
Other stories on the topic:
Techcrunch
Robert Scoble (Pod Tech)
Dan Farber - CNET
Rob Hof Business Week
Liz Gannes - GigaOm
Kate Greene - MIT Technology Review
Matt Marshall - Venturebeat
Search Engine Journal
She Finds Blog
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