TinEye - reverse image search engine

From: http://www.tineye.com/

TinEye

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching.
TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 1,444,624,337 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for. For more information, please see our FAQ, and for some real TinEye search examples, check out our Cool Searches page.

Company Profile

TinEye is brought to you by the good folks at Idée Inc., an advanced image recognition and visual search software company. Besides TinEye - the world's first reverse image search engine - Idée develops several other image recognition based products and services used by the world's leading imaging firms:

• PixID - editorial image monitoring for the news and entertainment photo industry. Clients include Associated Press, Agence France Press, Splash News
• Piximilar - visual similarity search for large image collections. Clients include Adobe Systems and Masterfile.
• PixMatch - automated image matching and deduplication service. Clients include eBay, Getty Images, Digg, iStockphoto, M6, SmileTrain, Photoshelter.
• TinEye API - commercial TinEye searching using image identification. Clients include eBay, iStockphoto, Spreadshirt, ClusterShot

Idée is an independent, privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

TinEye Contributors

Our goal with TinEye is to connect images and information and to make sure that images can be attributed to their creator. If you are managing a large image collection, get in touch to have your image collection added to TinEye. This makes it easier for the original image authors to be found, and for image seekers to get the information they're looking for. Contributors can submit a range of content from stock and editorial photographs to product images to illustrations and more. Learn more about our submission process.

What the heck is this?

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This is a fun embeddable widget that demonstrates the image identification technology behind TinEye, our reverse image search engine.
What you are seeing is several edited variations of the same image. They were all found on the web using TinEye reverse image search, simply by searching for the a version of the original image. We took the results of our TinEye search and put them into this image-flow interface, which allows you to scan through the different images and see the differences between them.

How does TinEye's reverse image search work?

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, there are 1,444,624,337 images in our image database.
When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match. Our fingerprinting technologies have been developed by Idée Inc.
TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.