Riya - a photo search company specializing with facial pattern matching have released a new product with a slightly different perspective (a major difference in business value).

The portal that came live around 12 AM (Nov 8,2006) is @ www.like.com. This seems to be one of the first portals to extensively use images as input to perform a search. Like.com takes in keywords and images to get the search results.

Though limited to a set of products currently, it is pretty interesting , to see the way u could perform ur searches. It opens up a brand new perspective to search. One could control based on the color, shape , pattern etc.

Have a look for urself. Pretty innovative and intresting.
Here is a sample text search for ‘Shoes with Wheels’. Impressive on the first look. mmm

P.S : I was personally hoping (and still wishing) Riya would improve on the facial recognition and probably provide with a offline utility to sort and categorize 10K’s of images on my local hard drive and automate tagging to a great extent. I feel Riya is in a special position to fill the void between the huge photo achieves on the local disks and the online photo services.

Update : Scoble has an interesting interview with Munjal CEO, Riya & Like @ ScoleShow. The story behind obtaining the domain name was interesting (somewhere in the initial 10 mins of the video).

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