10 ms·

eBay launches visual search tools that let you shop using photos

116 points by dayve 9y ago

CamelCaseName 9y ago
I have been trying to use Amazon's visual search for the past week or two and out of many trials, it has only worked once. I wonder whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock) are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items. It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one but searching for it returns 10000 different items"
  - CamelCaseName 9y ago
    That seems like a rare case to me. Typically there's a company name or model number somewhere on the item, and often that identifier returns a very specific item. Looking around my house, I only see a few items that don't have unique identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very visible and highly unique names.
    - tom_pinckney 9y ago
      Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for these kinds of purchases.
    - nasredin 9y ago
      In case of goods from China brand name and model can be useless because a lot of products are just the same thing but just with a different fly-by-night Chinese firm logo on top. Image search could be useful if you want to find all the listings for a specific Chinese product and compare prices or revisions.
- thess24 9y ago
  Yes, the types of photos will have a huge impact. eBay most definitely has an advantage in that regard.
- gdulli 9y ago
  > I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items I call this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the latter. It's worked very well for decades.
lolsal 9y ago
It seems like ebay would have a ton of user-provided photos which would be a possibly huge corpus for machine learning to help identify objects like this. It will be interesting to see how well this works!
- bflesch 9y ago
  The yellow sofa example in the article looked very convincing.
contingencies 9y ago
I'm pretty sure Taobao in China has had this for ages. Search suggests[0] since as early as 2011. To test it, go to Taobao[1] and click the photo icon at the right of the search box (previously only available in some countries and product categories, now apparently global). If this was the other way around it would be "OMG China is copying the west!" No such discussion the other way around. Just sayin'... [0] https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-image-search-engine-for-shoppers/ https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-im... [1] http://www.taobao.com/ http://www.taobao.com/
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Sort of; they also have links to visually-similar items if you hover over a listing, if there are the 'right' amount of matching products. I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- cisanti 9y ago
  Also aliexpress, but it is possible that taobao was first.
averageweather 9y ago
Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to eBay. Not some online yard sale where you have to meet people in person for the exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people to sell their stuff. If this already exists, do tell. In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare. I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still did not work. More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee. I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only option now. I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...
- searchers 9y ago
  I think blockchain will help us with this.
  - untog 9y ago
    It would be interesting to create an HN bot that replies exactly this to every top submission, then track the up/downvotes
    - sha256link 9y ago
      I think blockchain will help us with this.
  - SamPatt 9y ago
    For the payments layer, yes, but not for storing the actual marketplace data. Blockchains aren't great for storing data apart from maintaining a transaction ledger. When we started building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think. There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on top of.
searchers 9y ago
As I understood, there are 2 different apps: "Find it" and "Image search". If yes, .. why?
blntechie 9y ago
Just adding - AliExpress has had similar feature for more than a year when I started using it. It doesn’t work really well though.
addictedcs 9y ago
Interesting how we built a raw prototype about eight months ago (https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x), but it never took off (at least for the customer whom we've pitched). To add to other's comments, the visual search can be quite useful comparing to terms search specifically for non-native speakers and people who are not skilled in fashion terms (i.e., the name of the material, pattern). As for how accurate it is, this is indeed an existing problem. If you product set is significant (>10k products), then the visual search results can be entirely off the target, not surprised Ebay is dealing with the same problem.
- zepolen 9y ago
  I didn't find that surprising since your blue bag results in the demo returned a bunch of bags that didn't look at all like the original.
  - addictedcs 9y ago
    The fuzziness was added on purpose in a way to recommend you products you may be interested in (not necessarily the exact match).
    - zepolen 9y ago
      You won't succeed in business if your response to feedback is defensive and you don't even try to get to know your target user. Your reply should have been 'oh really, why is that?'.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Seems like a great way for eBay to undercut brick and mortar stores (and for consumers to save money) on cheap junk from China that people would rather pay $0.99 and wait 3wk for than pay $4.99 and have right now.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Also dropshippers who resell such Chinese products under different names for a margin.
tegansnyder 9y ago
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup content-based (visual) image searching using a CNN to process images. I'm looking to build a POC of a reverse image search trained with in-house product data. In the past I've used the imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.
- dahernan 9y ago
  For a POC you could use Tagbox, just a REST API packed as a Docker container from https://machinebox.io https://machinebox.io, here the blog post https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-eb30062d8abe https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-eb30... Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)
ll931110 9y ago
Shameless plug for my friend's startup, which has prototyped the concept and got a few customers for the last year. https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/ https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/
Kiro 9y ago
How can I use this from desktop?
dboreham 9y ago
My pet startup idea, going back I suppose 15+ years is a service that does this: You have something. You like it. You want another one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description. Idea originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out, he'd buy another pair the exact same. Over the years I've noticed many instances where I really want another one of something I have but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the things. Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at least the 1970's. A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same kind.
- 51Cards 9y ago
  I would use a service like this. I am similar to your friend... When I find a product that I like I'm good with getting more of the exact same in future vs. bouncing around through other brands. I have another Bluetooth headset still in box for when this one dies for example. Usually when this happens it's eBay I turn to (or Google image search) and so I am hopeful for this new system.
- whoisjuan 9y ago
  I would totally use this. 8 years ago I bought a pair of Nike shoes in Paris. I loved those shoes. I tried millions of things to buy a similar pair but I was unsuccessful at finding them. Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the individual who helps you find the item.
  - thess24 9y ago
    I've been building an automated service very similar to this for womens fashion (mens fashion soon) in my free time over the past 5 months using deep learning. The goal is to index existing items, and then expand to items that are no longer available. So you could take a picture of your shoes/shirt/hat/etc and it would ideally find the same one. If it doesn't find the same exact item, it would find similar items at different price points that you could buy. Getting similar items isn't that hard -- getting the exact item is much trickier though. With the pace of improvement in these types of models, there will probably be a lot of these types of apps popping up over the next few years.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Someone's been watching Big Bang Theory reruns.
introvert 9y ago
Surprisingly, it works well. I tried searching for few items and it showed similar items on ebay..
syntaxing 9y ago
I know a bunch of sites has this feature already but I'm pretty excited to try it out since eBay is probably the website with the best dataset. I do not think any other site has as many home taken pictures as eBay. This would definitely make the image recognition much more robust. I'm guessing the problem with Amazon or TaoBao is that most of the pictures are studio pictures and does not scale well when a person takes a picture in a random environment. That being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to be a much better transaction.
martinshen 9y ago
Can someone explain to me why eBay is trading only at 5.5x P/E? I fully understand that it isn't growing tremendously but with all its classified assets, I can't help but feel that it should be trading at a much higher market cap.
- quizme2000 9y ago
  Funny I noticed this also on yesterday's the Show HN stock viewer. Seems like ebay is ready to be bought or acquired with a stock transfer and cash deal. I would think Walmart would be in a damn good position to pull this off even though I'm no fan of walmart in general.
- jk2323 9y ago
  Interesting point. But p/e so long, and they are never paying dividends, what is happening with that money? I don't think of ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist. They had Skype. They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I don't see any innovation from this company.
conceptoriented 9y ago
To test a machine learning algorithm, one can use "Fashion-MNIST": https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist "Fashion-MNIST is a dataset of Zalando's article images—consisting of a training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes. We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training and testing splits."
dessant 9y ago
I have made a browser extension[1][2] for those looking to perform reverse image searches with multiple engines at once. It's more reliable than Chrome's built-in image search, which appears in the context menu only for <img> elements, while this extension parses the clicked area to extract images. Support for shopping sites may come in the future. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image/cnojnbdhbhnkbcieeekonklommdnndci https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image/cn... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...
482794793792894 9y ago
Last weekend, my dad needed new printer cartridges and so we went sifting through the internet for different offerings. By chance, we got onto a page on the manufacturer's website, which had images of all their cartridge packs. Among those, we also found an XL version of what we initially thought to buy. So, there we were, needing exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little freaked. Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...
zokier 9y ago
It would be interesting if they'd use this tech to deduplicate the gazillion listings for many cheap (chinese) goods which seem to use common set of images with maybe varying watermarks etc.
eurticket 9y ago
Pintrest should've hit this first.
- thess24 9y ago
  Pinterest does have something similar and has a few blog posts about how they did it
pkamb 9y ago
I thought the title said "let you STOP using photos (when selling)", which is what has basically already happened due to the prevalence of stock images and CGI items on a white background. I'm still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches. Would be a HUGE indicator of an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.
- hippich 9y ago
  Amazon for example requires you to put picture on white background. They do not actively enforce it, but if someone complains - they will remove picture which does not fit their requirements.
  - pkamb 9y ago
    Makes sense for Amazon, which is mainly a store for new items / open box used items. Don't care about pictures of the actual item. If I'm buying vintage/antique items on etsy or eBay I want to see the real item, not a stock photo.
incan1275 9y ago
Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York. Really great engineers in that lab.
adityapatadia 9y ago
We provide similar technology as a service if anyone is interested to hire us. Check our demo at: https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client
ecommerceguy 9y ago
I wonder if I snap a fake rolex it will find an actual fake rolex.

116 points by dayve 9y ago

I have been trying to use Amazon's visual search for the past week or two and out of many trials, it has only worked once. I wonder whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock) are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items. It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one but searching for it returns 10000 different items"
- CamelCaseName 9y ago
  That seems like a rare case to me. Typically there's a company name or model number somewhere on the item, and often that identifier returns a very specific item. Looking around my house, I only see a few items that don't have unique identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very visible and highly unique names.
  - tom_pinckney 9y ago
    Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something you like based on pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily described in words. Image search is the perfect fit for these kinds of purchases.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    In case of goods from China brand name and model can be useless because a lot of products are just the same thing but just with a different fly-by-night Chinese firm logo on top. Image search could be useful if you want to find all the listings for a specific Chinese product and compare prices or revisions.
thess24 9y ago
Yes, the types of photos will have a huge impact. eBay most definitely has an advantage in that regard.
gdulli 9y ago
> I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items I call this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the latter. It's worked very well for decades.

lolsal 9y ago

It seems like ebay would have a ton of user-provided photos which would be a possibly huge corpus for machine learning to help identify objects like this. It will be interesting to see how well this works!

bflesch 9y ago
The yellow sofa example in the article looked very convincing.

contingencies 9y ago

I'm pretty sure Taobao in China has had this for ages. Search suggests[0] since as early as 2011. To test it, go to Taobao[1] and click the photo icon at the right of the search box (previously only available in some countries and product categories, now apparently global). If this was the other way around it would be "OMG China is copying the west!" No such discussion the other way around. Just sayin'... [0] https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-image-search-engine-for-shoppers/ https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-im... [1] http://www.taobao.com/ http://www.taobao.com/

leggomylibro 9y ago
Sort of; they also have links to visually-similar items if you hover over a listing, if there are the 'right' amount of matching products. I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cisanti 9y ago
Also aliexpress, but it is possible that taobao was first.

averageweather 9y ago

Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to eBay. Not some online yard sale where you have to meet people in person for the exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people to sell their stuff. If this already exists, do tell. In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare. I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still did not work. More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee. I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only option now. I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...

searchers 9y ago
I think blockchain will help us with this.
- untog 9y ago
  It would be interesting to create an HN bot that replies exactly this to every top submission, then track the up/downvotes
  - sha256link 9y ago
    I think blockchain will help us with this.
- SamPatt 9y ago
  For the payments layer, yes, but not for storing the actual marketplace data. Blockchains aren't great for storing data apart from maintaining a transaction ledger. When we started building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think. There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on top of.

searchers 9y ago

As I understood, there are 2 different apps: "Find it" and "Image search". If yes, .. why?

blntechie 9y ago

Just adding - AliExpress has had similar feature for more than a year when I started using it. It doesn’t work really well though.

addictedcs 9y ago

Interesting how we built a raw prototype about eight months ago (https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x), but it never took off (at least for the customer whom we've pitched). To add to other's comments, the visual search can be quite useful comparing to terms search specifically for non-native speakers and people who are not skilled in fashion terms (i.e., the name of the material, pattern). As for how accurate it is, this is indeed an existing problem. If you product set is significant (>10k products), then the visual search results can be entirely off the target, not surprised Ebay is dealing with the same problem.

zepolen 9y ago
I didn't find that surprising since your blue bag results in the demo returned a bunch of bags that didn't look at all like the original.
- addictedcs 9y ago
  The fuzziness was added on purpose in a way to recommend you products you may be interested in (not necessarily the exact match).
  - zepolen 9y ago
    You won't succeed in business if your response to feedback is defensive and you don't even try to get to know your target user. Your reply should have been 'oh really, why is that?'.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Seems like a great way for eBay to undercut brick and mortar stores (and for consumers to save money) on cheap junk from China that people would rather pay $0.99 and wait 3wk for than pay $4.99 and have right now.

icebraining 9y ago
Also dropshippers who resell such Chinese products under different names for a margin.

tegansnyder 9y ago

Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup content-based (visual) image searching using a CNN to process images. I'm looking to build a POC of a reverse image search trained with in-house product data. In the past I've used the imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.

dahernan 9y ago
For a POC you could use Tagbox, just a REST API packed as a Docker container from https://machinebox.io https://machinebox.io, here the blog post https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-eb30062d8abe https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-eb30... Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)

ll931110 9y ago

Shameless plug for my friend's startup, which has prototyped the concept and got a few customers for the last year. https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/ https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/

Kiro 9y ago

How can I use this from desktop?

dboreham 9y ago

My pet startup idea, going back I suppose 15+ years is a service that does this: You have something. You like it. You want another one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description. Idea originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out, he'd buy another pair the exact same. Over the years I've noticed many instances where I really want another one of something I have but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the things. Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at least the 1970's. A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same kind.

51Cards 9y ago
I would use a service like this. I am similar to your friend... When I find a product that I like I'm good with getting more of the exact same in future vs. bouncing around through other brands. I have another Bluetooth headset still in box for when this one dies for example. Usually when this happens it's eBay I turn to (or Google image search) and so I am hopeful for this new system.
whoisjuan 9y ago
I would totally use this. 8 years ago I bought a pair of Nike shoes in Paris. I loved those shoes. I tried millions of things to buy a similar pair but I was unsuccessful at finding them. Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the individual who helps you find the item.
- thess24 9y ago
  I've been building an automated service very similar to this for womens fashion (mens fashion soon) in my free time over the past 5 months using deep learning. The goal is to index existing items, and then expand to items that are no longer available. So you could take a picture of your shoes/shirt/hat/etc and it would ideally find the same one. If it doesn't find the same exact item, it would find similar items at different price points that you could buy. Getting similar items isn't that hard -- getting the exact item is much trickier though. With the pace of improvement in these types of models, there will probably be a lot of these types of apps popping up over the next few years.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Someone's been watching Big Bang Theory reruns.

introvert 9y ago

Surprisingly, it works well. I tried searching for few items and it showed similar items on ebay..

syntaxing 9y ago

I know a bunch of sites has this feature already but I'm pretty excited to try it out since eBay is probably the website with the best dataset. I do not think any other site has as many home taken pictures as eBay. This would definitely make the image recognition much more robust. I'm guessing the problem with Amazon or TaoBao is that most of the pictures are studio pictures and does not scale well when a person takes a picture in a random environment. That being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to be a much better transaction.

martinshen 9y ago

Can someone explain to me why eBay is trading only at 5.5x P/E? I fully understand that it isn't growing tremendously but with all its classified assets, I can't help but feel that it should be trading at a much higher market cap.

quizme2000 9y ago
Funny I noticed this also on yesterday's the Show HN stock viewer. Seems like ebay is ready to be bought or acquired with a stock transfer and cash deal. I would think Walmart would be in a damn good position to pull this off even though I'm no fan of walmart in general.
jk2323 9y ago
Interesting point. But p/e so long, and they are never paying dividends, what is happening with that money? I don't think of ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist. They had Skype. They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I don't see any innovation from this company.

conceptoriented 9y ago

To test a machine learning algorithm, one can use "Fashion-MNIST": https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist "Fashion-MNIST is a dataset of Zalando's article images—consisting of a training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes. We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training and testing splits."

dessant 9y ago

I have made a browser extension[1][2] for those looking to perform reverse image searches with multiple engines at once. It's more reliable than Chrome's built-in image search, which appears in the context menu only for <img> elements, while this extension parses the clicked area to extract images. Support for shopping sites may come in the future. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image/cnojnbdhbhnkbcieeekonklommdnndci https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image/cn... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...

482794793792894 9y ago

Last weekend, my dad needed new printer cartridges and so we went sifting through the internet for different offerings. By chance, we got onto a page on the manufacturer's website, which had images of all their cartridge packs. Among those, we also found an XL version of what we initially thought to buy. So, there we were, needing exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little freaked. Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...

zokier 9y ago

It would be interesting if they'd use this tech to deduplicate the gazillion listings for many cheap (chinese) goods which seem to use common set of images with maybe varying watermarks etc.

eurticket 9y ago

Pintrest should've hit this first.

thess24 9y ago
Pinterest does have something similar and has a few blog posts about how they did it

pkamb 9y ago

I thought the title said "let you STOP using photos (when selling)", which is what has basically already happened due to the prevalence of stock images and CGI items on a white background. I'm still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches. Would be a HUGE indicator of an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.

hippich 9y ago
Amazon for example requires you to put picture on white background. They do not actively enforce it, but if someone complains - they will remove picture which does not fit their requirements.
- pkamb 9y ago
  Makes sense for Amazon, which is mainly a store for new items / open box used items. Don't care about pictures of the actual item. If I'm buying vintage/antique items on etsy or eBay I want to see the real item, not a stock photo.

incan1275 9y ago

Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York. Really great engineers in that lab.

adityapatadia 9y ago

We provide similar technology as a service if anyone is interested to hire us. Check our demo at: https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client

ecommerceguy 9y ago

I wonder if I snap a fake rolex it will find an actual fake rolex.