Sogou, the search engine curated by Sohu.com, launched its image-based search solution lately by which users can search images based on the pictures they uploaded.
According to Ru Liyun, the General Manager of Search Business Division of Sogou, the company has spent half a year and hundreds of thousands USD on the feature.
Usually, we search for a picture by input text keywords into search bar, while on Sogou image-based search, we could upload a picture or input an online picture’s URL as a reference to land more similar pictures.
Baidu released similar image searching functions in the Jan of this year.
The difference between Sogou’s offering and Baidu’s, is that Sogou will use image recognition technology to analyze a picture’s topic to find more similar pictures that belong to the same topic.
But after my trial run, I thought there’re more to be expected from the fancy feature. Like, when I uploaded a picture of a cartoon character, I was expecting some other different pictures of it. However, what I got are just the same pictures with different sizes. As for Baidu, I tried in vain several times to upload a picture but only to find an error notice saying ”Sorry, failed in uploading picture. Please try again” before I decided to pull it out. It seems Baidu has discontinued the service.
