One night in 1994 I lingered in the college computer lab just a bit longer than usual. The nice guys who always helped me with printer settings and such were juggling polyhedral dice and speaking of dungeon masters. But one of them took a break…he might have been temporarily imprisoned…and very patiently explained something to me. He called it the “World Wide Web”.  It was all about words (right up my alley) and occasionally, if you were lucky—it was about pictures.

Times have changed. Most of those guys are bazillionaires now and although they introduced me to the Web in terms of words, some signs suggest it’s become primarily about pictures. Enter the Tin Eye Add-on.

TinEye uses image identification technology to search the Web, rather than keywords. Once TinEye is installed, you right click on an online image and select “Search Image on Tin Eye” from the menu.

Search an image and TinEye compares it to every other image in their index. TinEye finds exact matches to the image, including crops, edits or resizes. You results will look something like this:

A “Compare” feature points out differences between similar images and your original images:

I’m blown away by what search engines can do these days. Even if it’s only for the “wow” value, you have to give TinEye a spin.

Post from Elise Allen, who reminds everyone that the American Gothic couple are siblings, not spouses. Try putting that fact in a picture. See all posts by Elise Allen.