TinEye and Google Goggles applied to the entire Internet? Yes please. I can't wait to play around with this.
What will be even more interesting is if they release an API for it in the future. Sites like imgur and reddit could then suggest if you're uploading or submitting a similar image to one that already exists.
I just tried TinEye (hadn't heard of it before) and it appears to only look for images that are modifications of the image being searched for.
I wonder if Google's will work the same, or if it will be possible to find other images that are similar, but not based on the same image? That's what I really want.
The "similarity" of two images is a very complicated concept, when people are asked to tag images the overlap rarely goes above 20% on average (e.g. check out http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ and try your hand at it). Think about it: you may think at the object level (both images have cars), concept level (both are happy images), color, etc. This is why large online stock image sellers still rely on tags extensively.
As a rough analogy, consider a textual example: Find a sentence similar to "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Now, if you enter this sentence in Google, it retrieves documents that contain it, in TinyEye fashion. What other similarity is desired? Should it retrieve essays on Austen, on marriage, 17th century English literature...?
If you are interested in image similarity search, check out the Pascal challenge (http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/voc2011/inde...). The advances in the last 5-6 years on object detection and visual feature extraction (which image similarity relies on) is amazing.
Actually the presentation showed a query for an old picture returning images taken from the same place.
It's being said that they're doing it by matching images' basic lines and shapes.
An API would be amazing. Could make a service that tells you if any of your Flickr/dA/Picasa photos are being used anywhere else on the web, etc. I'd pay good money for that service (as a photographer who has had photos stolen/used-without-permission).
What will be even more interesting is if they release an API for it in the future. Sites like imgur and reddit could then suggest if you're uploading or submitting a similar image to one that already exists.