Price on Image/Audio Search Developments
I've been working on a Google roundup post and got suddenly sick of writing about them. Then I kicked back and read a couple great posts from Gary Price on image and audio search.

First he points to Cydral, a French image search engine that enables users to find visually similar images. It kinda sorta works.

A friend uses image search in his post-doc microbiology work, and we talked a little last night about the complexities of a machine performing vision recognition.

It didn't seem like Cydral would have much academic use, but there was some kind of shape/texture recognition going on when I clicked on the search for similar images link.

I'm not real impressed. Gary thinks we'll see the "find similar image" function soon at "major image search engines near you."

I'm not seeing any immediate marketing use here, but it's interesting to see search engines move beyond text/tags to actually recognizing images. Flikr's maybe doing something along these lines?

link

He also reviewed Yahoo's recently released audio search:

"It's a one-stop, comprehensive service that allows the user to search, find, and access both open web audio files (via a Yahoo crawl) AND audio files from numerous music/audio (fee-based) services from Yahoo's own Music Unlimited, iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, Emusic, GarageBand.com, and several other services. Of course, to download these tracks you'll need to pay."

link

Thanks for keeping us in the loop Gary.

And props to Natasha "no gTalk" Robinson. If you HAVE to get your Google fix go look at
Brad's site. (Though he's missing the gVideo Conferencing rumor and Global IP Sound Google press release). Dang.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |