Similar image search engine GazoPa – The most fun I’ve had in a long time…

I’ve been watching and writing about GazoPa since they launched in 2008, and it just keeps getting better! You can use GazoPa as a traditional image search engine, just type in a keyword and it returns the images. But GazoPa is actually a “similar image” search engine. What it really wants you to do is to upload an image and then let it go to work finding the best matches.

Here’s a simple and quick example. I uploaded a picture of me, and GazoPa tried to find similar images of me in their database, but since I only really use one, it had to go to similar images. By “similar,” I mean that very precisely. For example, the closest match that GazoPa could find had a similarity score of 73.52%. So, To Tell the Truth, can you guess which photo is of me – and do you think the others are similar?

Here’s a more practical application of their technology:

If you worked for Starbucks in their legal department, searching for abuses of their logo, you wouldn’t get very far with keywords and tags. With GazoPa, however, look at what my search returned, all types of good infringements, and the pages that they came from! It even found that really fuzzy one.

GazoPa has also released some new categories, as they describe briefly here:

Images on Twitter: Twitter is getting popular as sharing images well as sharing comments. Since images on Twitter may not have enough tags, it’s not easy to search for them afterward. Now GazoPa allows users to search for similar images on Twitter.

Funny Images: We realize that some users use GazoPa to search for funny images. So, we made new ‘Funny’ link and tab that allows these users to find Funny images more easily. An image has a power to make you laugh and relax.

Sports Images :
Sports images were displayed together with News images before and we
received feedback that asked us to show sports images separately. We made a new ‘Sports’ link and tab accordingly and this enables sports fan to reach desired images more easily.

In fact, all over their site I found that there has been a major upgrade in functionality. I encourage you to “hover” over everything to see the finer points, and to click on the various links to check out all of their offerings. Then upload the picture of someone in your office and post the results!!