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

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