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Actually that depends heavily on what you are searching for.

it dependeds on what your searching for and what information you have about the subject your searching for, but there is no doute in my mind that voice search will become more popular then photo search. It is true that photo search can be usefull time to time, but voice search is a MUCH better idea.

You see a car driving down the street that you like and want to know more about. You see a tree that has a fruit growing on it but you don't know what it is. You see a product in a store and you want more information about it. Picture search would come in handy in all these situations. Let's face it, speech recognition is nothing new. Picture search would be more useful anywhere. So I think picture search is a better idea.

I agree.

In other words you don't understand it. If you did you'd know that it was far from pointless. Enzo gave some very good examples above. If you have a picture of something but know nothing about it which is easier, trying to describe it to a normal search engine and coming up with thousands of irrelevant links or searching with the actual picture and finding exactly what you want?

Hehe, maybe for laughs, but hardly because it would be more efficient than just using words.

i wonder.....

Saadu, this could quite possibly be one of the uses for this. If Microsoft or somebody hasn't done so already, maybe you should patent this and make a fortune!!! If you could really do this, then people wouldn't even need to know where they're going - just take a picture of the nearest roadsign (that shows routes at an intersection) and find your way from there. It could revolutionize travel and getting around cities (especially on holiday).

Cal

I have actually heard this talked about elsewhere (was it Slashdot?), but someone countered it with the photo needing to at least have enough landmarks on the picture for a computer to be able to figure it out. But it is an interesting idea though, however, there obviously needs to be a huge image database for it to work efficiently and the system having enough images to match on, and then I'm not even counting the headaches from automatic perspective corrections, etc.

Anyway, a lot of things are possible these days though, and Window Live Local already have these modes where it shows "street images", so at least for parts of the US, this could maybe be made to work. Globally, where it would be truly useful for travellers, I'm not so sure though, and it would need to beat the ease of just asking a citizen or pulling up a map (which is not necessarily in paper form these days, but just as well on a little PDA in a pocket, possibly connectable to a GPS system too -- tough competition ).

"I don't know how this works so it's useless."

LOL, just because you don't understand it doesn't make it useless.

I agree with you. So many people are missing how convenient it could be. It's like being able to submit a Google search on something by a quick pic with the cellphone. Snap an image of an interesting monument or statue, and get some background information on what it is, and what significance it has.

I am not a Microsoft fan, but this sounds like a great alternate way to search. I'm sure not that all searching is best done with an image, but this is a great search option.

Last edited by markjensen on 17 Apr 2006 - 14:30

Agree with you 100% Andre.

I am often a fan of Google's services, but I liked this idea.

Maybe not uber useful for everyone and very often either, but I can definitely see the uses for it in some cases.

At least if the MS web devs grows a brain and makes it an interoperable web service. I can probably count their online services launched the past few years and looking the same across IE, Firefox and Opera on one hand, and the same can't be said about Google's.

Nope, if Google came up with this I'd still say it was pointless.

BS, I can't begin to recall the number of times I could have used this. In fact I searched all over for something EXACTLY like this for a school project where I was trying to identify a type of plant. I posted on message boards all over the place looking for a way to scan a picture and actually search for information about that image instead of trying to put it into words. Don't think that you are so important that just because you don't have any use for something that it's pointless, because you are not that important. Go ahead and email MS and tell them you don't think it's useful, I'm sure they'll just drop the whole thing because of what you think.

yea that is true, the programming will be hard and complexe.

Pattern recognition has been explored quite a bit already, and especially adult filters without preset URL's to block come to mind. Some of these works fairly well, but reports false negatives sometimes, which sucks a bit. However, a web search reporting, say, 20 matches for your image per page with 1 maybe a bit mismatching wouldn't be as a big and annoying deal as the same thing happen with a censoring filter, so I think this could work.

what???? what does that mean???

I think it's about the last paragraph in the summary above and Google being granted a voice search patent.

But I'm not sure if Google will demand royalties for others implementing voice searches. They haven't so far, and I know several database search mechanisms using human voices, for example in the phone bank business.

And I don't really understand what he means with "putting a voice search on your homepage". :-S
Google *wants* you to use their search engine for your homepage anyway.

Last edited by Jugalator on 17 Apr 2006 - 19:16

The only use for voice search I can think of is for people who are disabled and can't type easily, or maybe for people who can't type at all and have to hunt and peck at the keyboard. How many voice recognition products have came out over the years and flopped? I remember it being a big deal with OS/2 Warp 4, being able to run programs by talking to your computer. Well most people don't want to talk to their computer. If feels terribly silly unless you are a big Star Trek nerd, and in many cases inconvenient. Imagine a library full of computers with everyone yakking to them.

You need to know what kind of plant this leaf comes from.

I would just look at the URL of your image and tell you it is an Alder leaf. :shiftyninja:

LOL, sometimes it's not that easy.