Just hours after GazoPa announced its similar image public beta test to the public, Google announced that it was releasing its similar image search out of Labs. Now, anyone could have experimented with the similar image search while it was in Labs, but you can only run one Labs experiment at a time. And a new experiment, Social Search, was added to Labs yesterday.
We're used to seeing Google release updates, products, major news, etc. in reaction to Microsoft or Yahoo! but saying "Me, too" to a smaller site just seems weird. Not everything that Google has done in this light has been ready (cough, Google Squared, cough). So, how does similar images fare?
To try it out, go to Google Image search. I used "pumpkin" to test it out since that's the keyword I used with GazoPa earlier. Thankfully, Google returned images of pumpkins. GazoPa only returned one or two even with keyword search.
The red circle in the graphic above highlights the "Find Similar Images" link, which I hope is self-explanatory. Sure enough, images of pumpkin similar to the one I clicked on appear in the results.
Unfortunately for GazoPa, Google is already light years ahead in similar image search. That doesn't mean GazoPa could never make inroads, they just have their work cut out for them.
