Bye-bye word search

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IT'S like this: You pass a person on the sidewalk wearing a pair of stylish shoes made of light brown leather, with a rounded toe. You'd like a pair like that. But an Internet search for \"shoes, light brown, rounded toe\" probably won't go very far.

Don't worry. With the new image-searching technology, you have a better chance of finding those dream shoes. The new US shopping website is like.com. Shoppers can upload a picture, instead of keywords, and let it search online for a similar item.

This is a first, said Munjal Shah, creator of like.com: \"Every other search before this was text-to-photo. But some things are hard to describe with a few keywords.\"

The new image-mapping search technology may be a fundamental change in the way people use the Internet, said Kevin Barnhurst, head of University of Illinois' (US) department of communications.

\"The idea that you should be able to shift into the visual and think in visual terms is the next step. It's exciting,\" said Barnhurst.

Shah explains how the website works: \"We convert each picture into about 10,000 numbers, which represent more than 30 features, including shape, color, texture and other details. When you search, what you're doing is comparing the numbers for different items. So, strictly speaking, we don't compare two pictures, we compare two maths representations.\"

Have I seen you?

With like.com, people can select clothes from celebrity photos. They can also use traditional text filters to sort by brand, style and price.

Besides online shopping, the new technology could soon be used to recognize human faces. A new image search engine being developed by the Swedish company Polar Rose is trying to make computers recognize faces.

Polar Rose's system analyzes a photo to create a 3D sculpture of a person's face, which can account for changes in angle and lighting. It then encodes the 3D portrait as a set of numbers, which is called a \"face print\". Different face prints can be checked to see if they seem to be the same person.

Polar Rose is still in beta, and it's not clear how well the service will work. The photos on the Web have bad quality, different expressions and different poses. \"it's not easy. Even for people it's hard to distinguish between two photos sometimes,\" said Mikkel Thagaard, Polar Rose vice-president. AGENCIES

Privacy concerns

FACIAL recognition technology could make it easier to find pictures of friends online. That's just fine. But does it have other more evil implications?

Well, yes. Imagine shopping in a supermarket when someone happens to snap a picture and you're in the background. Then that person posts it on a public site. A search engine like Polar Rose could allow your boss to find out you were out playing about on a day when you called in sick.

US lawyer Lee Tien warned that this kind of technology could aid stalkers in tracking down victims, or it could allow employers, insurance companies, and the government to look into people's lives.