TinEye is an image search that allows you to search for pictures that are a copy or edited versions of what you upload or link to. It's a pretty cool concept, even though it's index is pretty small. For instance, I wanted to try and find the source for this motivator, but it didn't turn up any results:
It was, however, able to find the source picture for this motivator:
It not only found the source, but also a flyer (in Spanish, I think) that used the image to advertise a club, and a bunch of other versions of the pic as well. If the index continues to expand I could see a search like this being very useful. There have been a lot of times I've wanted a larger version of a pic. Not only that, but it might also be possible to keep track of where an image is being copied on the web, as well.
Anyone else played with this or know of a similar search engine?
#2
elph
I tried 5 images and it came up blank on only 2 of them. Some of them had some pretty general names too. Pretty cool.
It shouldn't matter what the name of the file is, they claim "TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks." and that it works by creating "a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches."
#4
Hylian
I tried around 10 images and it only couldn't find results for about 3 of them.