Retrievr - Cool, but not perfect.

Posted by Jim Stroud

February 7, 2006

This may be old news to some, but I am going to post it anyway. Somebody hipped me to a new search engine on the block for searching images. I checked it out and the results were mostly wrong, but I had to give it a cool rating because of its approach to search. Instead of looking for images based on keywords or tagged items, you draw what you are looking for. Based on your sketch, it searches its database of images and serves up what it thinks your drawing is depicting.

The engine is called Retrievr and it is part of Flickr’s product offerings. (Flickr was recently acquired by Yahoo). I tried Retrievr seveal times and after almost giving up, I got a result I thought was decent enough to share.

What I was drawing was a human eye and the screenshot below shows you what Retrievr thought I was drawing. You be the judge…