TinEye is an image search engine. It basically does for images what Google does for text, sorta…

Just as you are familiar with entering text in Google to find web pages that contain that text, using TinEye, you enter an image to find pages where that particular image (and modified versions of it) appears.

TinEye is still in beta and it works “ok”. I search for few of my images I knew were at least on several websites and TinEye only returned few hits.

“TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks.

TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.

To date, TinEye has indexed 701,666,310 images from the web. TinEye crawls new images from the web on a regular basis, so this number is always increasing.”

I’d definitely keep an eye on them because it’s really promissing and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day, Google or another search giant ends up buying them!