VentureBeat

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).

Updated

For the third quarter in a row, U.S. venture capitalists poured more money into private companies than they did last year. They invested $6.36 billion in the third quarter, five percent more than last year. They backed 611 companies, two percent more.

These are the findings of the latest report by Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young.

The third quarter investment levels were slightly lower than the second quarter, but dips are common in the third quarter, when summer can often slow dealmaking.

Overall, the levels are more robust than any time since the post-Bubble trough in 2001. It is the first time since then we’ve had three consecutive quarters in which investments exceeded $6 billion.

Factors contributing to this trend include the robust merger and acquisition market and the positive results of recent technology IPOs, the survey said. These give venture capitalists a way to “exit” their investments profitably, and encourage them to invest more.

Deal flow in alternative energy more than tripled from a year ago, and the “information services segment,” which includes Web 2.0 companies, saw 41 percent more deals than in the third quarter of 2005, the survey said.

More early-stage financings were done, too, perhaps driven by the more than $35 billion in new venture capital funds raised over the past 18 months, the survey said.

In the third quarter, 38 percent of all VC deals were seed or first-round deals, the highest allocation percentage this year. However, this activity was stronger in healthcare, where 44 percent of the deals were early stage, than in the information technology segment, where only 32 percent of the deals were early stage. The following gives you some idea where the latest action is: In the specific IT sub-sector of “information services,” which includes Web 2.0, some 61 percent of the deals were seed and first round deals. In energy, 79 percent of the deals were in these early stages.

However, it is important to note the overall dollar amounts being pumped into these Internet companies is relatively small. There’s a lot of early-stage experimentation in Internet companies, but companies in other sectors are pulling in bigger dollar amounts.

Venture capitalists pumped $1.16 billion into “biopharmaceutical” companies, for example, or 9 percent more from the $1.27 billion during the same quarter a year ago. Information services companies pulled in $491 million, and that’s actually down from $538 million the same quarter before.