Enter Visual Search Engines
We all know that we can type a keyword phrase in a search engine and it would rank a particular image based on the relevancy to the keywords contained in that image’s Alt tag, or the copy surrounding the image or even the meta data on the page.
Enter new technology that is taking your image search to the next step! Yes, the technology can now effectively scan and ‘see’ what the image is in order to provide the searcher with information about the image. So now instead of using text to find an image, you can upload a particular image and run a query based on the image’s contents.
So how could you take advantage of this new visual search technology? From a company standpoint, you would be able to research corporate imagery or brand usage online, search for images to see where they are being used or if they have been modified and even research products using a product photo. Or, what if you took a picture of something and then couldn’t recall the name of the building in the background; or you want to find out who some people are in a group photo.
According to LTU Technologies, you can upload an image from your computer and ask its visual cataloging product to show you images identical to your image, variations of the image, images similar to the image or a high-resolution version of the image.
For example, let’s say you’re looking for a watch image similar to the one highlighted in yellow – by running a visual search using LTU-Corbis, you would get some of the following results:
Needless to say, a company would stand to benefit from visual searches especially if they rely on images to help sell a product due to increased visibility in search engines. More traffic might be coming to a website as a result of the images the site has indexed in the new image search engines!