Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Google's Visual Search

This afternoon I decided to play around with Google's visual search and decided I don't like it at all. The idea is that you can provide Google with a picture and it will search for similar ones. Furthermore it will classify your picture for you. If you go to Google and click on the "Images" link in the upper right corner, it will go to a new page that looks very similar to the standard search page. However there will be a camera icon in the search bar. Simply click on the camera and it will ask you to provide a picture or URL of a one. I pulled a picture of myself off my computer and sent it to the search engine. The picture was me wearing a blue shirt against a white background. Simple, right? Well Google classified the picture as a "Senior Citizen" and gave me a bunch of similar pictures of old bald guys wearing blue shirts standing against a white background.

First of all, I am not even 50. I think classifying me as a senior citizen is a bit harsh. This also indicates how the visual search engine works. It can't guess that I am looking for other pictures of myself on the Internet and assumes I want to see other bald guys in blue shirts in front of a very simple background. It just so happens that most of those also include senior citizens and so I got classified that way.

I did another search for someone a bit more famous than myself, Bruce Springsteen, and Google correctly identified him. Perhaps I am just not famous enough. I guess that is something else I should work on this year.

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