SubscribeVisual search with Like.com
Posted by stuart on November 08th 2006
Like Visual Search has just launched with much fanfare – it’s so cool, it even gets an ‘alpha’ label. Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington have provided us with the best coverage, with Robert providing two podcasts for your viewing pleasure. Other coverage here.
My first impression of the site was that it was nothing more than a gimmick that wouldn’t catch on but after playing with it a bit more, I’m starting to get impressed. I won’t go into too much detail about how it all works as it’s more fun figuring it out yourself.
I tried searching for a couple of relevant items such as a red purse for the wife and a black leather wallet for me. The results were surprisingly quite good but to be fair Google Images does a pretty good job with these searches too. The killer feature that Like.com is working on (it’s still not perfect) is the likeness searches.
Once you’ve found something that looks like something you want, you can then choose to search for similar-looking items. This is something that no other search engine can do yet which is why Like.com is generating all of the fanfare. Not only can you search for similar-looking items, you can also search for similar-looking areas of the item.
This feature is probably more useful for searching for items like jewelry as you can highlight a particular feature of the jewelry and like.com will attempt to find other matching items. The other key feature that I haven’t yet mentioned, is that all of the results that are returned have prices listed and a link to the respective website where you can purchase the goods online.
As I mentioned before, this still isn’t perfect and you may get some odd results, but it definitely has a lot of potential.
Posted by stuart
Filed under Websites, web services
Tagged with like, riya, scoble, techcrunch, web 20, web services, Websites
6 Comments
I think LIKE have some competition in this space… London based PIXSTA launched http://www.chezimelda.com recently, a huge online shoe store browsable by image. Comparing the two, LIKE’s site is quite fun and i like the celebrity section… but for a pure shopping experience Chez Imelda is much more simple and intitive. I use Chez Imelda personally.
Hey Steve, thanks for the link – looks quite cool too, but I wonder how they are doing it on the back end??
Hey, you can call me old school, but I still prefer lists with catalogs like eg http://www.who-sells-it.com over those those so-called experience shopping sites simply to the fact that many items are not yet available in those product sites.
Yeah – that’s a valid point. This is still a bit of a niche market and I’m not sure that the target market is tech-savvy enough to appreciate it. It is cool technology though that can only get better.
Sure, Stuart, when the most producers will understand the value of having their products as XML-feeds available those product-centric sites will be unbeatable.
Too true – especially as all the newest browsers have built-in RSS support, it should bring it to the masses.