Google Image Search, say hello to Riya 2.0, because you will soon have company.
Riya 2.0 is certainly an interesting shift. I liken it to the development of voice recognition technology and taking some low hanging fruit. IBM, despite being a major driver of the technology research, has focused on the holy grail of 100% accurate voice recognition. The problem is there are many other places voice recognition works in much simpler situations such as using your call phone or navigating calling menus on places like Sprint customer service.
My point is that this is an important move for Riya because they could go from being pretty good at doing something to being the best at doing something. That is, perception may not be totally accurate, but Riya's product for identifying people based on images across the internet has not worked as well as planned. Celebrities have popped up as looking like other people, and that does not exactly inspire confidence in the product.
Riya could also make waves in comparison shopping. Some online retailers, in an attempt to skirt price comparison shoppers, have renamed products or changed IDs, but still use the standard product image provided to all retailers. With Riya 2.0, which should be released in a few months, you could select an image and it will generate a list of similar images across the internet. For products, price comparisons would be generated.
In short, Riya could dominate consumer facing search.
Up until these new developments, image search has not been that great because you do not have many options for filtering. But with Riya, perhaps you could filter a search for "beach" by finding images with a similar pattern as another completely unrelated image. It seems there could be a bevy of uses only limited by the capability to do filtering and the creativity of the users.
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