According to a new report out this afternoon, Google quietly picked up a startup by the name of Undecidable Labs last month. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Cathy Edwards, is now head of engineering and product development for image search at Google, according to the report, a change which is reflected on her LinkedIn profile. Edwards was previously an Apple engineer…
Google seems to be under fire lately. Less than a week from the European Union’s charges against the Mountain View company regarding supposedly unfair practices towards its hardware partners, TIME is reporting that the famous stock photo agency Getty Images is now accusing the technology giant of “promoting piracy” with its Images search engine…
There’s a commonly-held myth that any image found in Google images is fair game for anyone who wants to use it. In reality, most images are copyrighted by default and usage generally requires permission – especially for commercial use.
Google’s Matt Cutts has tweeted that you can now filter images by usage rights. If you want to find images you can use commercially, for example, just do your search, click Search Tools and then select ‘labelled for commercial use’ from the pull-down.
It’s not immediately apparent how Google identifies the permissions associated with an image. We’ve reached out to Google and will update when we have a response.
Search by Image breaks down source image into little blocks matched against Google’s vast content database
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply ask Google to analyze an image and return relevant results? Recently, I’ve been discussing this with my beer friends and we came away wishing a feature like that sooner than later. Before any of us could have dreamed of, however, Google at a San Francisco presser this morning took search to the next level with a science-fiction like enhancement. They call it Search by Image and that’s exactly what it does.
You simply drag an image and drop it on the search box to get matching results, just as if you manually typed in your query. Tapping Google’s advanced image recognition back-end, Search by Image works – and this is the cool bit – with offline images that Google has never touched and doesn’t have in its index.
On-stage demos were pretty impressive. One example included dropping a scenery image on the browser’s window, which returned a list of locations Google thought accurately represented what’s on the photo. Similarly dropping a logo returns the name of the associated company. There’s more…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t99BfDnBZcI&w=670&h=411]