3 Fascinating Search Engines That Search For Faces

Thanks to the internet, our private lives are more and more exposed online. The amount of data every individual is adding appears to be a drop into the ocean. Does that thought make you feel safe? Think again!

Search engines are becoming ever more smarter in managing the massive amounts of data they are facing. In fact, face search and facial recognition are just a few of the many tools. When used the right way, they quickly unravel what an individual has been up to.

Here are three face search engines that may give you a thrill. Let’s see what they reveal about you or your friends.

1. facesearch – Face Search Engine

his search engine is as harmless as it can get. It searches for faces based on image tags. So you query the search engine for a name and it will return all matching images containing faces. And as you can see in the example below, it doesn’t appear to be very accurate at that.


Did you know you could make Google search for faces only, by adding a small bit of code? When you go to Google Image Search, enter your query and then add “&imgtype=face” (without the quotes of course) to the end of the URL. It will give you similar results as facesearch above.

2. PicTriev – Face Recognition Search Engine

PicTriev goes one step further by actually searching for similar faces. So what you do is upload a portrait shot or any face photo in .jpg or .jpeg format, with a size no larger than 200KB, and the search engine will return matching images found online. You can also run a demo with a selection of famous photos.

For demonstration purposes, I used one of my funny photos. The approximate age of 20 is very flattering and I’m happy that PicTriev recognized that I was mostly female. Unfortunately, however, my face matches mostly with that of males. Surprisingly, it didn’t come up with any pictures of me that are available online.


It works much better with celebrity images.

3. Viewdle – Face Recognition Video Search Engine

Viewdle is a facial recognition video search engine, powered by Reuters Labs.

It analyzes videos frame by frame, searching for faces. Moreover, it adds contextual information to the face recognition data by converting speech to text. All of that is combined in an index, which allows to search for the right person, in the right clip, at the right moment. In other words, it helps you find information and people in videos.

At this point Viewdle can only find famous faces. Just type in a name at the bottom left and you’ll be forwarded to the search page. Here you can also enter a keyword to narrow down the results. Advanced search allows you to refine the search results by picking a video channel and time frame for the video.

Obviously, this type of indexing is highly useful for TV stations, for example to browse their archives for relevant material.

Source:- http://bit.ly/cKLw4B

Nurph Creates An Instant Chatbox On Any Site

Chatting has become something of a second nature to a lot of people. It’s cheaper than SMS or telephone, and still covers that mind-blowing distance.

However, people have a lot of problems thinking out of the box on this one. Quite literally. There’s always a need for preparation. Installing the right applications, building your network. It’s nothing compared to the freedom of real life, where you can bug almost anyone you walk into.

There’s a notable exception to this rule; website chat rooms. Although more common on smaller, amateur websites, chat rooms give that real-life feel to a website, giving ‘customers’ the ability to interact with their hosts, or fellow interested parties. Perhaps set-up and maintenance is holding website hosts back. Nurph takes that out of the equation as well.

Nur.ph

It’s incredibly easy to create a site-specific free chatbox using Nurph. You don’t even need server-side access! Allow me to explain how it’s done.

There are two ways to Nurph a website. First, point your webbrowser to the Nurph website. There enter the URL of a site – any site, even a YouTube video – and hit Go.


Nurph will open the specified site, and overlay it with a chat box. Notice that the URL points to a shortened nur.ph URL. Anyone visiting the website via Nurph, or following the shortened URL directly, will be able to access the chat box.


Nurph uses Twitter for sole identification, which is actually about its only real downside. If you don’t yet have a Twitter account, you’ll have to sign up before you’re able to use Nurph. On the other side, with the need for identification, this makes for an immediate moderation barrier.

Luckily, you don’t need to pass through the Nurph website every single time. To use the Nurph bookmarklet, add this link to your browser’s bookmarks bar. If you want to generate a chat box-ed URL, simply hit the bookmarklet while you’re on a webpage.

Personal & Business Uses

If you’re a website administrator or blogger, you can use Nurph to add a chatbox to your site. Even if you’re using GUI-side-only services like Blogger, Tumblr or Twitter. Simply generate the URL and put it on a prominent place on your blog, profile, or Twitter page.

Nurph also suggests making it into your homepage, so people have a chance of chatting with the website owner a couple times per day. Using a service like Nurph, and promoting your site through it, not only adds to user satisfaction, but can keep them on your site exponentially longer, and thus increase your ad revenue.


But there’s no way Nurph is only interesting for professionals. Users can Nurph other websites than their own and, if well-promoted, help you discover like-minded individuals. This is especially true for community websites and discussion forums.

Source: http://bit.ly/cUCZwg

Google Chrome Powered Netbook in Two Weeks?

Still remember that quick poll which Loren did several months ago when Google announced that the Chrome OS will be targeted primarily for netbooks? Majority of you voted that you will buy the Google Chrome powered netbooks when it comes out. Well, better psyche up yourselves folks as reports had it that the first of such netbook will soon be launched.

Actually, let me retract a bit here. The said Google Chrome powered device will be demoed at the upcoming Computex 2010 electronics fair happening in Taipei on June 1-5. And guess which brand will be the first to run the Chrome OS? – The lucky manufacturer is none other th an Acer. What’s not clear here is what the Acer device will be? Is it going to be a netbook, tablet or smartbook?

A Google Chrome powered netbook seems to be the easiest route for Acer. But given the renewed popularity of the tablet, thanks to Apple’s iPad Acer might also demo a tablet instead. But then, if Acer wants to come up with tablet PC of their own that will rival the iPad, they can just use the Android OS.

A netbook running Google Chrome OS would certainly be more exciting than a tablet. Acer has already captured the netbook market, it would be safer and more practical for them to concentrate on netbooks instead.

Going back to the question, and modifying the premise a bit – are you still going to buy a Google Chrome powered netbook given that the iPad is already out?

Source : http://bit.ly/czIdPi

Nachofoto – Real-time Image Search Engine

You may have noticed the past year that both Google and Bing are doing real-time searches that are including tweets and other information. This is extremely useful when keeping up with trending topics. I wanted to give you a quick run down on this new real-time image search engine called NachoFoto that I came across. When searching images in this, you’ll find that the results are directly correlated to the trending topic and news that has recently occurred. For instance, the recent Times Square bomb scare- NachoFoto Search Results.

When searching in Google, you might see something like, Google Search Results when searching for the same Times Square bomb scare. They also have “hot topics” and “trends” which you can find only in text, on their trending topics page.

As I mentioned before, you can also see trending topics that people are searching, image wise. It’s almost like going into Twitter and clicking the trending topics there to see what people are saying. On NachoFoto you can see the same, however, it’s in images. Another feature that is unique to this search engine is that static words, such as “golden gate bridge” will most likely not yield a result, because nothing significant changes over time. It would become on the map when a huge event is trending in regards to that particular topic.

The “NachoBot”, as it’s so fondly referred to, crawls and indexes images on the web using a “load spreading” technique. By doing so, it will reduce the strain that occurs on the server when being indexed. It’s very light. You can also choose to exclude the NachoBot from crawling and indexing your page in your Robots.txt file how it’s written below-

* robots.txt example: Include this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Nachobot Disallow: /
* Robots META tag example:

Include this in the head section of your web-page:

* Nachobot META tag example:

Include the following in the head section of your web-page:

There isn’t really too much to say at the moment, as this is just coming out and becoming well known. Keep your eye on it though because it has a great idea behind it and it fills a need that we’ve been lacking from Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Hopefully they will all follow suit and implement something like this. Do you think we’ll need to start marketing differently if we want our images to show up there? How does their algorithm work, and how can we push to rank in the forefront of the search results? I guess this will all come to surface as time goes by and it becomes more mainstream.

Source: http://bit.ly/dv7PPX

Google Now Lets You Drag Images from Desktop to Gmail

The Official Gmail blog just made a brief post announcing a new Gmail feature. So this means that Gmail does not only allow you to drag an attachment from your desktop onto Gmail but images as well.



Basically the new Gmail feature combines two features to allow Gmail users to drag email attachments and images as well. And its pretty simple to use as well. All you need to do is to drag the image in, resize it before sending the email.

Incidentally, this new Gmail feature currently works for Google Chrome only. But Google promises to make this available to other browsers as well.

So, if you’re fond of attaching files and images to your email messages, you’d might found this new Gmail feature useful.

Source: http://bit.ly/aoZwoW

Google Integrates a Virtual Keyboard to Search

Google has just rolled out a new search feature that would benefit those who search using non-English language. If you’re one of these people you’d be glad to know that Google search now features a virtual keyboard that would let you type search keywords in your own language.



Wait, it’s not really a touchscreen virtual keyboard like what the iPhone and other touchscreen phones have but an “onscreen keyboard” which you control using your computer’s keyboard. You can either click on the virtual keys or by pressing the corresponding keys on your computer’s keyboard.

You will see this virtual keyboard if you use Google search in any of the non-English languages supported by Google’s virtual search keyboard. A keyboard icon will appear on the left-most corner of the screen which when you click on it will bring out the virtual keyboard.