PicItUp.com - Visual Search Picks Up

These days, search is the name of the game, and it looks to be a lonely field out there, especially with only one true competitor—the mighty behemoth that is Google. And yet, there a lot of minor players looking to make a dent in search engine technology. Two of the yet to be conquered fields in search include semantic search and image search. The latter in particular is of interest to many--visual recognition in search is a major breakthrough and whoever can do it with the most accuracy and efficiency has much to gain. Picitup is looking to get into this field. It’s a visual search engine, that like so many other search engines, piggybacks off of Google or Yahoo and begins with a textual search. Simply enter your query in the search bar, and Picitup will show the results from one of the two. You can filter searches by clicking Similar Pictures under the picture of your choice or filter by Color, Landscapes, Products and Faces. There’s also a naughty filter to fend off those NSFW pics that may pop up. For fun, you can toss in a picture of you and your closest friends and play Celebrity Matchup—see which celebs you resemble most. Picitup is now in public beta.

“Picitup is a leading web 3.0 developer and provider of content based image search services.
Research and development is based in Israel.
The company is headed by a team of seasoned executives, with proven track records in Artificial Intelligence and product building”

Picitup is certainly fun and easy to use. The accuracy may not all be there but the filtering options do help tremendously to find what you’re looking for. It’s better than what Google currently offers and visually more interesting.

Will the accuracy issue be a problem? Why base searches off Google and Yahoo, especially if the all important Google page rank cannot be tampered with? Can it compete with others in the image search game?