Visual Search Engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web through the input of an image or a search engine with a visual display of the search results. Information may consist of web pages, locations, other images and other types of documents. This type of search engines is mostly used to search on the mobile Internet through an image of an unknown object (unknown search query). Examples are buildings in a foreign city. These search engines often use techniques for Content Based Image Retrieval.
A visual search engine searches images, patterns based on an algorithm which it could recognize and gives relative information based on the selective or apply pattern match technique.
Compfight. The visual search engine provides a clean experience while looking for whatever image you need. It pulls all of its images from Flickr, but as you may know, Flickr occasionally has the hiccups. This would be a good backup whenever you’re needing to find things right away. However, one of Compfight’s more practical uses is its WordPress plug-in.
Compfight – Compfight takes all of the images that it displays from Flickr. However, it avoids some of the pesky problems that are associated with working with the latter. This provides you with a cleaner and easier to use experience. Again, all the results are Creative Commons backed. Of particular note, the WordPress plug-in is recommended. This is because the whole task of looking for images in a new tab, downloading them and resizing them creates quite a bit of work. However, the Compfight plug-in allows the possibility for searching for images while you are in WordPress itself.
TinEye – you may not have heard of TinEye, but it has apparently been around for a very long time. You have to be a little creative to be able to use it effectively. It is well known for its reverse image search option. Searching by image will not necessarily find you what you are looking for. One benefit of this particular search engine is that you can use MulticolorEngine. This is great for designers. You decide what colour you are looking for and then TinEye searches Creative Commons images that are this colour.
CC Search – one of the biggest challenges when looking for images to use on other sites is knowing whether you are allowed to use them or not. In most cases you need to search for Creative Commons images, as these are generally allowed to be used widely. CC Search solves this problem by only seeking out images that are Creative Commons, saving you the time of trying to figure out the rights for yourself. You enter what you are looking for into the search engine and the tool searches a variety of sources for suitable pictures for you to use. It is still worth double checking that you can use the picture when you find the right one, just in case.
Flickr Storm – Flickr Storm provides the opportunity to search for images a little more creatively and it provides both a primary and secondary list of search results based on what you type in. The first list is based on the words that you typed in for yourself. The other list is a little more creative because it uses keywords that it comes up with based on the ones that you put in. This can provide a more varied search for an image than you might have come up with on your own.
WeSEE – WeSEE is still in beta format but is growing at a rapid rate and has value to offer for your image search. In particular it focuses on presenting images based on your search in a minimalistic way, making it a lot easier to spot what you are looking for. It also benefits from using keyword search functions and the reverse image option.
Bing Image Search – Some say that Bing Image search is one of the best visual search engines. Experts say how Bing is better at understanding image quality and at filtering images by characteristics such as by size, color, layout, date and even license (e.g. Creative Commons).
Google Image Search – Last but not least, Google Image Search has plenty to offer if you are seeking images with lots of opportunities for narrowing down the scope. Some think it is the best search engine for images. You can find images that are Creative Commons, search for images by colour and also do reverse image searches. Overall Google enables you to be able to use different kinds of search criteria to find what you are looking for, enabling you to make very effective searches. In short, you don’t want to leave Google Image Search out when seeking out an image.
oSkope is a visual search assistant that lets your search Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo!Image Search and YouTube in a highly intuitive way.