I can already picture some of the ladies going crazy over this one. If it actually works. So far Riya’s new product Like.com, a visual search engine seems pretty nice (its still alpha). Robert Scoble ran some tests to see how effective it is. Robert says that it works, but he would expect more results. I concur. I ran some of my own tests, and even though they produced results, the number of results wasn’t enough. I don’t know if they don’t have enough products listed, or its their search algorithm which is not fine tuned enough.
Some of the things I looked for:
- Teal watch – 27 results
- Teal Watch with a silver strap – 3 results. Oops, none of them have the silver strap I was looking for, Only dials in silver/teal. Needs a little fine tuning there.
I ran several other tests similar to #1 & #2 and it wasn’t able to clearly distinguish what I was looking for. If I said “Pink watch with a silver strap“, it would pick out pink watches which have silver dials and which may or may not have a silver strap. Now it isn’t an accurate result of what I was looking for. But, its always good to give a shopper multiple options, so I wouldn’t call this “issue” bad.
I like the idea of telling the search engine what your looking for my point to parts of an image. Check out the flash tour to see what I mean. I can pick out parts of a item and find other items which have that ‘feature’. They even have a nice RGB table to pick out colors wow.
Also they’re using 250 servers with 4 processors each to power this website. Wow, that’s some power…its going to be a bitch to scale it. The search definitely needs to be optimized. Good thing its only alpha. Great things lie ahead for Like.com. However, I can’t say the same about their blog.
Technorati Tags: Riya – Like.com – Visual Search
Rushi's Ramblings 