Original English Subtitle: Searching for Jodie Foster

Absolutely every blogger in the blogosphere has been covering the TechCrunch40 Conference.

Of course my only interest is a) are there any Alternative Search Engines (ASE) represented, and b) are there any new ones? And the answers are “Yes,” “Yes,” and more “Yes.”

First of all, hats off to Faroo, one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, for being selected as one of the TechCruch40! Congratulations, Faroo!

Secondly, Powerset, one of our Stealthy search engines, is also a TechCrunch40 company. Much ink has already been spilled in anticipation of the Powerset launch, so we’ll cover that later.

As for new Alternative Search Engines, that would be Viewdle, a facial recognition search engine that claims to be able to search for faces within a video stream.

But it’s important to point out how we got to this point.

Pluggd, another Top 100 ASE, looks for words and images in audio and video files by their heat map signatures; they call it “SeeHere.” SeeHere uses an intuitive heat map interface to let you search inside a video and jump right to the parts that interest you.




PolarRose, another Stealthy ASE, looks for still images that have been tagged by other PolarRose users. The Polar Rose browser plugin for FireFox lets you discover who’s in any public photo. The browser plugin is currently in private beta so you need to sign up to be notified. The plugin adds their signature rose on all public photos where it detects a face.

And lo and behold, the first implementation is set for….the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco.

It is after those projects that Viewdle comes along, looking to identify actual faces within a video stream.

Viewdle is a facial-recognition digital media platform for indexing and searching videos. Viewdle automatically looks inside the video, frame-by-frame, to create a real-time index of true on-screen appearances.

If you want to experiment with Viewdle, you should go to the REUTERS Labs test site.

Since I can’t wait to see her movie, The Brave One, I searched for Jodie Foster.

And here we are, the State-of-the-Art in Facial Recognition Search Engines:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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