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Hi! We created a new type of search engine for the top free stock photo sites. It works by taking all the images, using T-SNE to lay them out in a gigantic gri
by jacobn 6y ago
Hi! We created a new type of search engine for the top free stock photo sites.
It works by taking all the images, using T-SNE to lay them out in a gigantic grid, then putting a quad-tree on top of that grid and letting you smoothly navigate that tree. It's a simple but surprisingly powerful concept: you can actually "walk" an entire catalog!
The search is really cool. Instead of just getting a paginated / infiniscroll listing, you actually get two full quad trees: one with search hits only, and one with the results shown in the context of all the other images. And you can switch seamlessly between them. The latter can be really powerful for finding poorly keyworded images.
Once you've gotten the hang of it (pan & zoom, very similar to Google Maps), you can explore the images at a far faster pace than you can realistically do with traditional search engines.
And T-SNE organizing the images works wonders for creating a sensible layout (be sure to zoom in - at the outer layers the sub-sampling makes it look jumbled even when it isn't).
- sharemywin 6y agoare visually similar images next to each other?
- jacobn 6y agoBy and large yes: T-SNE does it's best to achieve that - it's kind of tricky to take an N-dimensional space and flattening it to 2 dimensions. You inevitably get some tearing and some scatter. So they're not always next to each other, but oftentimes.
- sharemywin 6y agoThese two articles looked pretty interesting: https://towardsdatascience.com/compressionvae-a-powerful-and-versatile-alternative-to-t-sne-and-umap-5c50898b8696 https://towardsdatascience.com/compressionvae-a-powerful-and... https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/detecting-image-similarity-using-spark-lsh-and-tensorflow-618636afc939 https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/detecting-image-sim...
- throwaway888abc 6y agoThis is great! Bookmarked, will use. I think, bug spotted: Show results only 3,567 results But the grid is shoving only aprox 300 photos when zoomed out. How can I see the rest of results ? Pagination etc. ?
- jacobn 6y agoYou see the rest by zooming in (see the ?-button for all the ways to zoom).