Search engine Snap launched an image search feature today. The results are no better than that offered by the big guys, but Snap’s unique two column interface is something that some users find to be really cool. The problem with the lack of available photo meta data to assist with queries continues to plague all search engines, of course, leading to less than great results. It will be interesting to see if some of the new services launching, such as Polar Rose, can help by partnering with them and leveraging user generated descriptive data. More on Snap here.
Nothing is particularly new with Snap but I do like their UI. It’s both distinct from the other guys and visually pleasing.
The effects are cool, but it seems a little much for an image search. It’s taking a long time to load for me.
Stunning!
This isn’t anything revolutionary. Live.com has had this interface since it launched months ago
This is really nice to use. I think it’ll give Picasa a run for it’s money for user interface. the only part that might hurt is the load times of the pictures but we’ll have to wait and see.
Usability is excellent — the integration of the mouse wheel for scanning through photos quickly (even on secondary pages) is excellent. I use google image search a lot, I’ll switch to this and see how it goes overall.
That’s pretty good, but I’ll stick with a meta-search…this site has a good image one which you can also customize: http://www.srchr.com/?PageID=7.....0Arrington
image recognition is one of the most difficult tasks … even a “simple” think like OCR is dificult to implement, so it would probably would take a while for this to work perfectly, or within reasonable error margin, if ever.
Its really simple and convenient to use. You don’t have to click on the image to view a larger image. Search image in Google, the image are small, in order for you to view the image - you would have to click on twice. For Snap Image search, all you have to do is click on it once, the image is enlarge and clear - in the right panel (talk about slick, eh!)…
Yes, I do agreed that it is slow when loading, but once the images are loaded, its stunning.
John
@JHSA, it really is. It’s going to be fun to see how the technology advances now that it’s been brought to market.
Interesting. Looks like a web version of Beholder for the Mac:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13248
Why cant companies incorporate better Meta Data Filters. It isn’t that difficult to string the keywords of a Photograph.
But if meta data for images was available, what would happen?
Very quickly the spam merchants would most likely pollute the space with their poison. Nice images with completely inappropriate meta data.
I think we’ll be better off waiting for Google and various startups to solve
the image recognition/classification problem.
(BTW. Michael, I emailed you about a month ago. Never got a reply. Did you get the email?).
Stephen, please re-email me. or ping me on skype.
it seems all image search engines..pretty much suck…from yahoo-google
Wow, what an awesome 4-letter domain name and very relevant to what they do!
I like the 2 part screen but I just searched for images of 2 different musicians that I like. In each case I keep getting popups of an “authentification required” screen (not the same one in each case). This is very annoying. It would be nice if Snap could stop this.
Type in James Taylor and click next for an example.
As I understand it, Google and Yahoo would love to adopt this interface, but have not done so because of copyright concerns. There is no question that the interface of Google and Yahoo images is annoying to users, requiring an extra click and a costly page load.
Perhaps someone with legal experience can elucidate how cases like Google v. Perfect10 have shaped these interface decisions.
I did a search on the one thing that I’m the world’s best expert on: me. Also, I have a serious art hobby with a substantial art website with distinct colorful art at http://www.jonathanvanee.com (check it out!). Snap didn’t pick it up at first, but thanked me for my search. After a little while, a preview of my search appeared, along with three links. All links were relevant - which is unlike google and yahoo, where you get a huge amount of garbage along with your search.
Hey Michael, I’m a fellow Wilson Sonsini alumn who also has a substantial web presence (obviously not as big as yours though). I’ve sent you an e mail to the editor@techcrunch.com address and would love to hear from you.
Cool ….really cool. Something about the site sets it apart from other engines…I much like the concept of the 2 panels and how you are able to pick a topic and scroll right through the images…really neat.
http://www.jollyjo.org
Though I believe they have put much efforts to the user experiences, it’s still a little bit complex for a searching, compared with big search engines. For webmasters, the preview of the link service is very cool, and I think many webmasters/bloggers will add it soon, just as Techcrunch did.
Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com
The power in image search (and video search for that matter) will really come down to integration with the other services that will use them. either for a business purpose or for social networking. If they can get on the ball with some great ways to integrate with other services then it would go a lot further.
http://search.msn.com/images/results.aspx?q=flower
Compare the ASK layout and results to the MSN LIVE version of Image Search
…Interesting
Great. Except the reason no else is doing this is because it is a blatant copyright violation, not to mention dishonest to the website where the image was found (since they get no traffic, yet still pay for the image bandwidth).
On top of that, since Snap pre-loads all the images, that means third party sites get dinged for bandwidth even if their image never gets viewed!
This is outright bandwidth theft coupled with countless copyright violations.
If you are a webmaster who has ever dealt with annoying people hot-linking your images, you know how much this sucks. Lame.
Google has a different approach to get image meta data. It is not very well known, still in beta, but great fun, have a look at
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Two users (unknown to each other) try to give best labels to images. If they match, the get the next picture. Try it, it is really fun.
Image searching is done on meta data not images? Seems to me much better results would come back using the pictures. Something along the line utilized in fingerprint comparison. Prolly one more thing that shows how un-plugged into the ways stuff works I am.
@ Stephen
There will always be spamming. Whats wrong with looking at the meta data of images. If anything it will reveal data not usually found due to faulty alt tags, and image names.
Sure, if spammers want to waste time modifying every photographs meta data to get on the search engines image search they could, let them . Spamming isn’t anything new. But right now that problem is non-existent. When it becomes existent than you deal with it accordingly.
No point in dismissing a photographs meta data for fear of a problem that isn’t present yet.
Re: missing metadata and image recognition
This search engine does have a nice UI!
As for image recognition, the current techniques are still in the ‘blue sky research’ zone. However in some situations they may already be useful. We have been working for a few months on a prototype web image search engine called Behold which assigns likely keywords to images based entirely on image content. This is done using statistical techniques. When this is combined with regular metadata search results often improve. There are some example queries on the website.
They could just pay a few of us to meta tag data.
I used to do that for websites for StudyWeb (now LightSpan).