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The Freaky Future of TinEye

In a dizzying round-up, Reportr alerts us to 10 tech trends, the 11th presumably being to drop letter ‘e’s now that single-word domains are in short supply (cf. Flickr, Dopplr, Tumblr…)

The thing that caught my attention was the mention of visual search. I’ve been playing with a new search engine, TinEye, for a couple of months. It claims to be the first on the web – it’s probably the best example so far.

You submit an image to TinEye and it returns similar images from all around the web, based on pattern matching.

Their page of cool TinEye searches is a good introduction.

This is a nothing shy of a REVELATION. It’s funny how tech journalists remain all cool when they see something like that. Well I’m going to point out it’s AMAZING. Inevitable maybe. Given there is so much information on the web, there do remain undiscovered and undeveloped ways in which we can retrieve it. Visual search is a known problem – it just required somebody to sniff out the winning search index algorithm, for accuracy and speed.

In the life of the web, we have become accustomed to fairly good text-based search. The search box has become a second brain for many. We live in a post-search world. (At least, those of us who live in countries with easy access to the web do.)

How does Google find the stuff we want? At the moment a particular page or file has a URL. It may have other metadata such as a filename and keyword tags or alt tags. And unless you’re talking about a video or image, it could be a document with some kind of text body. It also has the pages from around the web which link to it. Those are the only clues, unless I’m forgetting any.

It’s pretty easy for computers to do pattern matching on text. Good search algorithms that work on text databases have been known for decades. But it’s the indexing of the whole web that’s always the big challenge. When you do a Google search, you’re not really searching the web itself, you’re searching Google’s indexes.

What is so amazing about TinEye is they are introducing another clue into the search – the content of the image – and found a quick enough way to index it.

Before I get too excited about TinEye, right now you can hope for hit-and-miss results at best, particularly as the pool of indexed images is relatively low. Since some early announcements of the service this has increased and they recently widened this pool to 901 million images, some of which might be yours.

It remains at the beta test stage, but it’s already quite useful. Some photographers and other visual artists have already been able to track down where their images have been used.

Visual search is still in its infancy and we can expect other players to possibly rival TinEye. There’s a shopping service called like.com mentioned in the Reportr trends piece, but I can’t seem to get past the nauseous feeling of entering a glitzy shopping mall the minute I arrive. It does pose another question for me.

What about the commercial outcomes of visual search? How will companies try to seek traffic from visual search? Will there be attempts at search engine optimisation? Will we see images being priced and ads being sold like Google AdWords? (GOOG)

TinEye doesn’t do human face recognition yet. Could it be just a matter of time, processing power and a dash of ingenuity? Let’s imagine a world where it is possible and it becomes a commonplace thing for use and abuse. Permit me to do some wild speculation.

What about finding doppelgangers and lost relatives? Missing people? It’s possible that a missing person could be an incidental feature of a photograph that somebody posts online.

Could it be used for casting films or theatre, when a new Kubrick absolutely has to find an actor with distinctive facial features?

What about looking for a partner? In a world already filled with all manner of weirdness, would someone try to seek a replacement partner who looks like their ex?

How could police use and potentially misuse this technology? Could they find missing suspects? Match fingerprints?

The future of TinEye and visual search could be like having eyes everywhere… It’s very promising and possibly a bit unsettling.

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England’s Dreaming

I was reading about the history of these islands last week. It set off a whole chain of thoughts, memories and some unexpected laughs.

I’m particularly enjoying this page.
http://cym.englishriviera.co.uk
Open the link “Listen using ReadSpeaker” in a new window and marvel at the cut glass computer voice making a total hash of the Welsh. Repeat for the other languages. I like the Japanese one, it sounds like a shortwave numbers station.

When I was around 7-years old, I went with my family for a holiday in Torquay on the south-west coast of England. That town and the region surrounding are known as the English Riviera.

Back in Victorian times, the original riviera – the French Riviera – had established itself as an affordable holiday destination, albeit for the rich.

Budget holidaymakers who couldn’t make it to France were a large market. So tour operators on England’s south coast responded with a rebranding exercise and the concept of the English Riviera was born. Giving the tour operators the benefit of the doubt, we could view it as an early example of what marketeers now call positioning.

Among my fond memories I remember the sight of scrawny “palm” trees withering miserably along the sea front. Palm trees don’t grow well in England, but the French Riviera had them so the English gave it a go. They eventually found a breed of New Zealand tree that looked a lot like palm trees, for that hint of class and exoticism for which Devon is (not really) known.

I had a good time in Torquay. But when I visited, the riviera label was already looking outmoded – and that was the 1980s. Now, in this era of low cost airlines, the English Riviera is a tired name, and today’s average 7-year old child will understand this. It surprises me that they persist in using this “me-too” brand rather than promoting the actual distinctives of the place. Why remain in a category in which you can only hope to be number two – or worse?

In music it’s like a tribute band inspired purely by a band that is still alive. What’s the point?

If you’re curious why I returned to the Riviera last week, if only mentally, I’d been searching for the word “Lloegr” on Google (GOOG).

In modern day Welsh, the words for England and English are totally different to each other. Lloegr means the area we now call England and Saesneg refers to its main language. Anyway, this distinction is pretty neat in my opinion. Consider the ramifications!

(Yes, we’re back on the double-Ls, at least for now.)

Lloegr is a very old word with origins in the Brythonic language which was spoken in many parts of what’s now known as Britain.

It’s believed England (as we now know it) was already called Lloegr, or something very similar, before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. And definitely before the Norman Conquest. But that’s another story and, you might say, another victory for the French – thankfully not compounded by any embarrassments involving branding or trees.

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Dolgellau

Recently I heard Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 refer to the town of Dolgellau in Wales (N52:44:24 W3:53:24). He pronounced it as “Dolga-l-ow” and made the last syllable rhyme with “cow”.

Why-oh-why can’t a broadcast professional do a little research before guessing this pronunciation? A little goes a long way.

(I couldn’t resist writing “why-oh-why” back there, it’s obligatory if you’re passing comment about the BBC. If it’s a positive comment about the BBC – and there are many conceivable ones – then you should finish by emphatically saying “thank you BBC”.)

There is such a thing as a Pronunciation Unit at the BBC for internal use. And a BBC styleguide which is quite a fun read.

There’s also a webpage of audio pronunciations which might be handy, courtesy of… the BBC.

To pronounce Dol-gell-au correctly, the last syllable rhymes with “eye” and the combination “ll” signifies a voiceless fricative sound. Put your tongue as if you’d make an “l” sound then blow air instead.

This sound is not unique to Welsh. Several other languages feature the sound. If you can already speak Navaho, Greenlandic or Zulu – or a combination of them – you’ll have no problem with it.

Thanks for reading my new blog. If you ever try to correct anything so picky as my pronunciation, I’ll fight you.

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Genesis of Quixotic Quisling

Carl Morris

Quixotic Quisling is a place for half-baked thoughts and dispatches on stuff I find curious.

The name of the blog means nothing in particular. It’s my Scrabble® pseudonym. I was imagining a world where Scrabble® players had names, like wrestlers.

Hope you like the blog!

I love you all.

Carl Morris, September 2008