The Wizards of Technology

What pray tell is TinEye, you say?

An acquaintance recently put me on to this neat goodie, that is almost as geeky cool as Bill Nye "The Science Guy."

Click below to read on, if we peaked your curiosity.

Quoting their website, "TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified."

"Just as you are familiar with entering text in a regular search engine such as Google to find web pages that contain that text, TinEye lets you submit an image to find web pages that contain that image."

"Every day TinEye's spiders crawl the web for additional images. Using sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for each one and adds it to the index."

"When you want to find out where an image is being used on the web, you submit it to TinEye. The attributes of the image are analyzed instantly, and its fingerprint is compared to the fingerprint of every single image in the TinEye search index. The result? A detailed list of any websites using that image, worldwide."

"Use TinEye to find out where and how an image appears on the web, even if it has been cropped or heavily modified."

Ok...now this is a really big claim on their part, and this skeptical wizard put this technology to the test. I first downloaded an image from a lesser known site in cyberspace. Then I cropped the image and uploaded the sample to TinEye for it to search. Not only did it find the image location where I had downloaded from, but a number of other sites that were using the image (or had lifted it for their use).

Not wanting to be outwitted, I took the same image that I had used, re-cropped it, then heavily modified it in Adobe Photoshop, and resubmitted the image to perform a search. TinEye found the image in no time, and in the process, made me a believer.

Check it out for yourself at tineye.com and watch their video presentation. It is worth the time!

Marc "Mister Marc" Asturias
Wizards of Technology