Well, this is interesting…
Those whizzkids at Google now offer a beta search where you drag and drop an actual image itself and it then looks for similar images on the net. You can try it here.
As I have never been bothered with RTFM’ing I thought I’d give it a go and just went straight to the site.
Here’s the image I chose at random from my pictures folder, I just dragged it straight onto the box:
A shot of the mighty World War II Lancaster bomber taken at a display
Here’s the result of the search – note in particular the second shot it found. The destination of so much of the Lancaster’s cargo. Now, that I found particular freaky!
Obviously, it’s looking for (and returning) tonally similar shots and as usual in pretty awe inspiring timeframes.
Dragged and dropped straight from my hard drive with no other info - impressive!
Give it a little guidance and the results get even better.
So I refined it a bit by adding the words “Lancaster Bomber” to the description and here’s what the result was:
A refined search and the colours and camera angles are so much more like the original
Well, it’s not perfect but it’s very, very interesting. Another example of world domination by Google that will at least be very useful for designers and the like.
