Eyealike image search lets you find people that look like your ex

November 12, 2007 | Dan Kaplan | Comments | |

eyealike.jpgStill obsessed about an ex? What if you could go to a dating site, upload his or her picture and find similar looking people on whom you could exercise that obsession? Thanks to Eyealike, a site that launches its private beta today, your sick dream can become a reality.

The company behind the site, ActiveSymbols, has developed a facial recognition capability that analyzes the individual features of a face and separately indexes its eyes, nose, mouth, hair texture, and skin tone. Instead of using these traits to identify you specifically — the goal of most biometrics technologies — Eyealike uses this index to find people who, as the name suggests, look alike.

The site has implemented this technology in two ways. One suggests that you upload a photo of yourself to find out which celebrities you resemble. The other matches the photo you upload against a database of headshots from Match.com and American Singles, enabling you to instantly sort through the thousands of people that don’t look like your ex and get straight to someone who does.

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Fortunately for ActiveSymbols and its unnamed backers, the company is not banking on the success of Eyealike as a destination site. Eyealike is intended to be a place to go to see the technology in action, and ActiveSymbols plans to license it to dating sites, and possibly the military. It also hopes, like another facial recognition company, Viewdle, to bring its technology to video, possibly helping track copyright violations. See AltSearchEngines for more.

The company is based in Bellevue, Washington.

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • Brian Fahn
    I know what she looked like. She has black long curly hair. She was about 5'6. Btween 140-180 lbs. Very nicely built and healthy looking. She was definitely italian. She drove a yellow jeep. She looked like she was in her 20s. She was very exotically pretty and was kind of big and beautiful. I saw her on March 25th at a WaWa on Trenton Road in Browns Mills, NJ