A bettr pictr searchr

When Google’s image search came along a few years ago, I was thrilled. Here was an easy way to pull up pictures, and something I hadn’t seen before. But then, I encountered a problem: How do I find a picture if I can’t think of the right keywords? There’s a disconnect: Because the search engine doesn’t allow me to describe the picture I’m looking for (and I don’t know how something like that could ever work anyway), I must struggle to think of words that someone, at some point, might have associated with the picture when they posted it to a website. It’s not easy.

But someone is looking out for me, and it’s the good people who developed retrievr. The system allows you to draw inside a small box, and it’ll try to match your drawing with pictures on flickr. As the site frequently points out, it’s still in its experimental phase, and using the site makes that clear. Draw a black circle, and you’ll get an eye; draw a square below the circle, and you may get a man sitting down, or maybe a cat. And sorry, boys (and some girls): Draw two peach circles next to each other and you get smiling poop, not boobs. But no matter: The concept is great, and they’re no doubt working to improve it.

The graphic above is a little experiment I did with retrievr. I began with the simple face on the top left, and then added features to it to see how it would affect the search results. I’ve laid it out like this: On the left column are the three phases of my graphic; to each face’s right is the search result that I thought was the closest match; to the right of that is the result that wasn’t quite close but still understandable.

At first, I was surprised that the program didn’t always respond to my drawings of faces with pictures of faces. In fact, at one point I put green hair atop the face and the closest result was a picture of a green donut. But the site’s creators explain this shortcoming: The search works on an algorithm, and “doesn't do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you're drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won't get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c. It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.”

Indeed, that makes a lot more sense. Great idea, retrievr. I look forward to future versions.

Posted by Jason Feifer at January 10, 2006 12:54 PM