Category: Multicolor Search

Google + colour searching

Well it is about time that the Google folks mimicked the Canadian search giants – yes, that us! Google introduced colour search to image searching. Nice. Of course it will be awesome! Still no multicolour on Google but you can try a simple hack to get the poor man’s multicolour on Google: search for a colour using a keyword (for example blue sky) and pick a different colour from the drop down. Voila! No great image search results but hey it is a start…

Now if you want the play with the real deal in multicolour searching head over to the Idée lab!

Love how a blog post on LifeHacker about Google’s colour search moves into a full discussion of Idée’s technologies namely: TinEye and Multicolor search. Fun times in the Ideeplex!

Multicolr Fun

Every once in a while we get an email from someone who has played with our lab technologies and built something fun and exciting. Last month I received an email from my good friend Patrick and since then it has been sitting in my inbox begging for attention! I am such a delinquent when it comes to emails! But that said: Patrick has an awesome career: he spends his time building exciting project, exploring how technology can enhance people’s lives and experiences. You may have seen some of his projects around Toronto. Just recently he built the TXTris wall version 2 which was showcased during HoHoTo on Monday. It was awesome, and I know a few of us spent time sending Tweets just to see them scroll down the screens (some the tweets were not fit to print so we won’t be repeating those here!).

Patrick was inspired by our Multicolr search to build a little prototype: this prototype basically takes a stream from a webcam and picks out the dominant colours and passes them through our Multicolr Search to find photographs that match those colours. Very, very neat and you can view it here:


Colrfindr from Patrick Dinnen on Vimeo.

Happiness in colors

A few months ago I had a great conversation with Daniela who is a Brazilian journalist at the Folha De Sao Paulo. Daniela was writing about our Multicolr lab – this is one of the Idée labs where you can search 10 million creative commons images using multi colours. You can select up to 10 colors for your search (go play, if you have never tried it, and please don’t blame me for the amount of time you will be spending there today!). Anyhoo…I remembered the conversation last night because of Garrett‘s comment below:

It is easy to forget how important color is in our world – this may seem strange coming out of the mouth of someone who has been wearing black (exclusively) for the past 2 decades but… color unifies us. My conversation with Daniela was not so much about how color searching works but more about how color breaks down all language barriers, we all have favorite colors, we all see and look at color differently and one thing is for sure: words are very poor color descriptors!