speech I can understand, but how does he figure pictures will be a huge way to search? There aren't that many times where I'm said to myself "I wish I could just take a picture to search for similar items".
If you think about wearables there's a more compelling case. If I walk past a car I like I can look at it and get specs, price, who has it for sale, etc. Or if I'm at the grocery store and wow, those tomatoes look amazing, I see recipes. While it seems weird to search by image right now, it will probably feel more natural once it's seamless; it certainly removes friction from the experience.
The thing is I don't think those are really image searches. If I take a picture of a car it's probably a car I can't afford so I'm not really looking for a dealer, I'm probably looking for either 1) what's the make/model, 2) where have I seen that before, 3) what year is?
For produce there are even more things I might be interested in. Is that a good tomato or what is that deformed looking red plant?
Essentially I'm saying that image searches have just never been useful for me without supplying textual context. Speech has the potential to help with that but just doesn't seem to work well in consumer devices yet. Speech will get there but image searches just aren't useful without speech or text.
While it seems weird to search by image right now, it will probably feel more natural once it's seamless;
Especially when we become so "plugged in" that I can search for what I see. Right now, if I want to see "tomato recipes" I'm probably not inclined to pull my phone out, take a picture (and who wants that on their stream anyway?) and then paste picture + recipes? I'd rather just type "tomato recipes". But if I can search what I see and speak, e.g. "oh look, tomatoes? Find recipes!" that's much easier.
Things like taking a picture of a product, and being able to order it straight away from Amazon. (big push behind the Firephone)
And then at some point, it'll become a live-streaming thing. i.e. instead of actually flipping out your phone and taking a picture, it'll be some google glass type thing. You walk past a store and you look at it and it's recognized instantly. You can then get the wiki page, the floor plan from gov records, its online store and opening times from various online repositories of such information. Of course this is already possible using GPS, just an example.
Maybe because you cant. But what if you could?
Ive frequently wanted to be able to take pictures of concert posters and have my phone prompt me to add it to my calendar; or just buy tickets. Or maybe its a picture of something you want to know more about and have no way of choosing a search term. You need to pick a category and then filter through results yourself.
As a sibling comment tersely stated, I have to think that such a shift to image searches will be dominated by pornography. Remember that porn accounts for an enormous fraction of web traffic and searches.
A friend once quipped, "the best porn site in the world is Google." As "reverse image searches" (where you provide an image for the service to find image matches, similar photos, associated information on the photo to figure out the identity of the person in the photo) improve in quality and data mining from the pages they find the related images from, the more people will shift their behavior to this from the current text based searching.
There will of course be searches for similar looking wardrobe or other commerce or travel reasons. But online porn is a behemoth that will overshadow any other image based search motive. It is driven by one of man's three basic desires after all (nourishment, sleep, and sex).
Well, Baidu, focusing on the China market, is not allowed to optimize for porn (though I'm sure they do covertly) If anything, they are expected to filter out adult images proactively.
Well, my thought is that even if Baidu won't allow pornographic searches, that won't stop its user base from adopting a separate service to fulfill their needs.
- take a photo of a street scene and ask, "how do get home?"
- or more generally, "where am I?"
- If I hate reading every ingredient on a menu to check for allergies, why don't I point my phone at the menu and have it tell me what I would like best?
- "what's in this sandwich?"
- take a photo of water, "is this safe to drink?" (maybe realistic with near-IR?)
- "what plant is this?"
- record birdsong, "what species is that?"
- photo of text fragment, "who wrote this and which book is it from?"
I assume it would be something like you see an object in real life, and you want to know more about it, so you take a picture of it, and use that image to search.
Comments
speech I can understand, but how does he figure pictures will be a huge way to search? There aren't that many times where I'm said to myself "I wish I could just take a picture to search for similar items".
If you think about wearables there's a more compelling case. If I walk past a car I like I can look at it and get specs, price, who has it for sale, etc. Or if I'm at the grocery store and wow, those tomatoes look amazing, I see recipes. While it seems weird to search by image right now, it will probably feel more natural once it's seamless; it certainly removes friction from the experience.
The thing is I don't think those are really image searches. If I take a picture of a car it's probably a car I can't afford so I'm not really looking for a dealer, I'm probably looking for either 1) what's the make/model, 2) where have I seen that before, 3) what year is?
For produce there are even more things I might be interested in. Is that a good tomato or what is that deformed looking red plant?
Essentially I'm saying that image searches have just never been useful for me without supplying textual context. Speech has the potential to help with that but just doesn't seem to work well in consumer devices yet. Speech will get there but image searches just aren't useful without speech or text.
Especially when we become so "plugged in" that I can search for what I see. Right now, if I want to see "tomato recipes" I'm probably not inclined to pull my phone out, take a picture (and who wants that on their stream anyway?) and then paste picture + recipes? I'd rather just type "tomato recipes". But if I can search what I see and speak, e.g. "oh look, tomatoes? Find recipes!" that's much easier.
or you could just type or say "honda civic" - is that really so hard?
A prediction is about what people will do, not what they should do. Taking that into account, is your objection relevant?
Things like taking a picture of a product, and being able to order it straight away from Amazon. (big push behind the Firephone)
And then at some point, it'll become a live-streaming thing. i.e. instead of actually flipping out your phone and taking a picture, it'll be some google glass type thing. You walk past a store and you look at it and it's recognized instantly. You can then get the wiki page, the floor plan from gov records, its online store and opening times from various online repositories of such information. Of course this is already possible using GPS, just an example.
Maybe because you cant. But what if you could? Ive frequently wanted to be able to take pictures of concert posters and have my phone prompt me to add it to my calendar; or just buy tickets. Or maybe its a picture of something you want to know more about and have no way of choosing a search term. You need to pick a category and then filter through results yourself.
This way you wouldnt have to do that.
I bet you've already done something like this with QR Code enabled posters.
As a sibling comment tersely stated, I have to think that such a shift to image searches will be dominated by pornography. Remember that porn accounts for an enormous fraction of web traffic and searches.
A friend once quipped, "the best porn site in the world is Google." As "reverse image searches" (where you provide an image for the service to find image matches, similar photos, associated information on the photo to figure out the identity of the person in the photo) improve in quality and data mining from the pages they find the related images from, the more people will shift their behavior to this from the current text based searching.
There will of course be searches for similar looking wardrobe or other commerce or travel reasons. But online porn is a behemoth that will overshadow any other image based search motive. It is driven by one of man's three basic desires after all (nourishment, sleep, and sex).
Well, Baidu, focusing on the China market, is not allowed to optimize for porn (though I'm sure they do covertly) If anything, they are expected to filter out adult images proactively.
Well, my thought is that even if Baidu won't allow pornographic searches, that won't stop its user base from adopting a separate service to fulfill their needs.
Some ideas...
- take a photo of a street scene and ask, "how do get home?"
- or more generally, "where am I?"
- If I hate reading every ingredient on a menu to check for allergies, why don't I point my phone at the menu and have it tell me what I would like best?
- "what's in this sandwich?"
- take a photo of water, "is this safe to drink?" (maybe realistic with near-IR?)
- "what plant is this?"
- record birdsong, "what species is that?"
- photo of text fragment, "who wrote this and which book is it from?"
I assume it would be something like you see an object in real life, and you want to know more about it, so you take a picture of it, and use that image to search.
Images will become more ubiquitous over the next few years. It's very hard to describe certain things that an image can very quickly.
I think mobile image search will see a big uptick if there's a good interface for it.
porn