Like has finally launched its visual search engine company, and it’s going to appeal to the shopping set, especially women.
Users select products from images, and then Like’s search engine will find comparable items to buy. Like is owned by Riya, which we have covered before, including here.
We find it compelling. There are other players in the market, but aren’t nearly as sophisticated as Like. For example, there is Pixsta, of London, which has built a shoe search at www.chezimelda.com with about $200,000. But it is elementary when compared to Like’s technology. Like is a classic Silicon Valley play, heavy on engineers, and stoked with about $19 million in venture capital from Bay Partners, Leapfrog and Bluerun. We’re still waiting for Google to release its competing visual search, which some say is better (see our story here).
Take for example, the image here of Tyra Banks. You can select her boot by drawing a box over it with your mouse, and then check a box to have Like search for similar boots. You will get a page like the one below (see bottom). Further, you can ask Like to search for things with a similar pattern, color, and shape — using a slider for each of the variables. So if you’re looking for a handbag with buttons on it, you can emphasize pattern, and maybe color, but deemphasize shape — and have Like generate results. Here’s a tour of how it works. And here are more details of the launch.
It is not perfect. It can get confused by focusing on a color or image in the background of a picture, for example, instead of the object you’re focused on. But it’s better than what’s out there. If you search for “red strappy shoes,” Like will produce a page of results with — shocker — red strappy shoes. While this may be obvious, if you try this at Shopping.com, you’ll get only four shoes that are red and strappy. That’s because “pixel values” of an image rank highly in Like, whereas Shopping and most other search engines don’t factor this in.
For now, Like is focused on jewelry, handbags, shoes and watches. Soon, it will add clothing, and other things like fabrics and garden flowers. Everyone has their favorite shirt pattern that’s wearing out at the seams, and can relate to not being able to find another one just like it. Like will let you find a similar one easier. You just upload a photo, select it, and search.
It will also be releasing an upload toolbar, so that you can select anything you see online, hit the toolbar and have Like search for it. It will also launch a mobile SMS product.
Jewelry, shoes and clothing command $15 billion in online sales, and merchants spend about 10 percent of their revenue on customer acquisition — meaning there is about $3 billion floating around to pay Web sites and other sources for lead generation. If Like can just get one percent of that, or $30 million in revenue, chief executive Munjal Shah says he’ll have a nice company on his hands. (He’d better hurry, because Google’s product will probably take some wind out of his sails).
14 Comments
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Pixlover said:
True but how much slower Like.com is :) Speed is the key with this kind of a service. Just raw performance of the software (short delay between the action and getting the results). I real like the ChezImelda service, the way the network recentres when you click on an image, quickly you experience 100’s of products… and soon you find the one you like, no matter if a celebrities has it or not…
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Jim Greer said:
I agree that it’s slow, but I’m really impressed by what a good job it does of finding things that look similar. The celebrity thing is a dumb gimmick, but I found some pull-on boots to replace the ones I’ve worn out.
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Bonnie said:
The service works very slow and returns mostly irrelevant results. Its design looks cheap. What kind of a woman is going to fall for it?
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Pixlover said:
I believe the truth of the story is that when you are asking state of the art PhD’s the visual and image search problem is a real hard one. Riya tried it with faces and failed when they it came to scale the service, the same applies for taking random pictures of celebrities, picking a view pixel indicating a silver shiny earing — and then hope a search engine will spit out someting similar, keep dreaming … 10 years of PhD’s research required to do it … I guess the ChezImelda.com stuff works a kind of because the images are very similar, white background and most important within the same category, shoes… A LONG WAY TO GO…
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"JD" said:
Some elements of LIKE are quite fun, but i’m not sure this is really a serious shopping site. The http://www.chezimelda.com site is a bit less finished aesthetially, but you can see instantly that their core technology is faster and more powerful - i wanted to find a pair of Crocs and managed it within 2 clicks !!! (Click on a bright orange shoe, then an orange croc… and BANG! i get 16 pairs !)
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amac said:
Nifty service, but the performance is too slow, inconsistent, techy to really attract their core audience that will actually drive revenues (according to the folks @ Riya, female tech savvy shoppers). While the celebrity spin may be a gimmick, celebrity styling is a huge market and one that they are trying to capture. However, the technology can tell you that Brad Pitt’s watch looks like a Casio (and delivers 5818 Like watches - most available @ Amazon, not exactly the watch mecca), but it can not tell you that its a limited edition Hublot that retails for 10k+. Most users want to know what he is actually wearing with some less expensive alternatives that look “like” his watch.
And what good is the service if you know generally what you want - for example, if you want Crocs, you would likely go to their website or do a search for Crocs, rather than finding an image of Mario Batali, zooming in on his footware and then waiting for the results.
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Rooffire said:
I’m not convinced this is really doing visual search. This could all be done by tags or hard-coded links since they control all of the content. Until I can search the web, see an image, select part of it, and then do the search, I’m not convinced it’s doing anything.
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Jayna said:
From my perspective, as a woman, this site’s look & feel is not a women’s site. Sure it’s supposed to be, but who on earth chose blue and yellow? Or that logo? Didn’t they have at least some sort of test audience of women shoppers? This is a very unappealing site to me. A bunch of guys sitting around a boardroom table picking logos and designs isn’t the way to attract women. Personally, I find it kind of corporate and boring. But who cares what I think… I only spend tons of money online and shop in the best boutiques.. oh yea, I’m the one they should be targeting.
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Paul Pruitt said:
Also check http://www.imgseek.net/ for an opensource desktop application with content based image search and its server side version: http://server.imgseek.net/ (may be interesting for those thinking of integrating visual search into their application or website)
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Prasad said:
An industrial strength working image search engine has been developed a long time back by this path breaking company. Check out this website
cheers
Prasad -
solihin said:
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Alessandra said:
For those interested in celebrity fashions and emerging designers, http://www.IguanaFashions.com is a great site that combines blogging and profiles of up-and-coming designers, with tags to find your favorite pair of shoes, handbags, accessories, and just about anything you can think of! I found this to be a truly unique experience, and I love the fact that it focuses on truly indie designers, and not the same-old designer labels. What a refreshing way to display new talent!!
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Matt said:
That is an incredible peice of technology. This sorta thing could really change the way we shop!
Just dont show my wife…
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Mr Swamy said:
This is just lame. It works only when i type in “round face watch”, but if i actually select a round faced watch, it doesnt return a relevant product. This is one of the lamest services I have come across. Im doing my PhD as well and I can tell u this aint any image recognition, this is the kind of stuff done when results are not impressive and u still have to get a “result”. And if Munjal has spent $25 Million on this, *cough*
3 Trackbacks
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[...] Riya’s Like launched recently (see our coverage), giving users a way of highlighting a shoe, or part of a shoe, and then look for similar shoes within its database of retail items — and so is helping with comparison shopping. You’ll notice, though, that Like operates in a controlled environment, allowing search within limited categories (bags, watches, shoes). Similarly, Swedish company, Polar Rose, just raised $5.1 million to help it launch its facial recognition, apparently due to be unveiled within the next couple of weeks. [...]
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[...] Here’s our previous coverage. [...]