Web Service Wed: TinEye
Ok, it’s Thursday now, but Wednesday alliterates with Web Service better, so I’m going to try to do these on Wednesdays. There are soooo many web service companies out there…and more coming all the time. So there will be no shortage of ones to review. I also like to play around with as many as possible, as it’s what we do so I figure it’s just part of our development process. And we pay for the ones we like, too. Because we want people to pay us.
Anyways, this week, I played around with TinEye, an image search engine. You upload an image or enter a URL to an image and then it tells you where all that image is (check out this brain graphic, TinEye’s pretty good). They also have a Firefox plugin, which allows you to right click any image in Firefox and search for that image elsewhere. But really, it’s pretty amazing (I searched for the image on the right, it found the one on the left):
Uses:
- Figure out where a photo came from
- See if anyone ripped off your logo or graphics
- Make sure you’re not violating any else’s copyright (images get reused so much on the web, it’s sometimes hard to know)
Suggestions:
- Catalog daily all current news photos — I often see a tiny photo attached to a news story and want to see a much bigger photo, but can’t figure out where it came from
Business model (as best can be determined):
- Currently: investors
- Eventually: ads? pay-per-search? paid service to guarantee you’re not violating copyright?
+’s:
- simple service, just works
- nice interface, intuitive, not confusing (there’s not much complexity to it, which helps)
- fast, very fast, considering what its doing
- handy Firefox plugin
-’s:
- Not enough images in its database yet (701 million…come on! we need billions!)
- RedPost’s logo not in its database (boo)
