WeSEE: A Better Image Search

Guest Author Feb 16, 2013 Tweet

This scenario happens to me a lot when I’m working on visual designs of any sort: I’m searching for images and ideas that will fit my designs, spending sometimes hours browsing through images on Google, Pinterest, and stock sites – gaining nothing in the process and eventually dropping my idea and searching for new inspiration.

Searching for the right image and coming up short kills my productivity, and it probably doesn’t help much in the creativity department, either. You see, when you’re working on a design, you don’t need to expose yourself to thousands of irrelevant images to get some inspiration. No sir, you need the right stuff, and you need it as fast as possible.

Two weeks ago, I came across WeSEE, a search and advertising company that released a new social search engine. This search engine was exactly what I was looking for since it allows users to search social media for content visually (images), textually, and with a text/image hybrid form called “hybrid search.”

WeSEE helps you find visual content that trends on social networks with an algorithm that understands and identifies visual content; this means that images that were shared publicly can now be found even if their owners never created a description for them or bothered tagging them. To do that, the engine identifies shapes, colors, and context.

Also, I love the fact that I can upload an image and get variations of the same image with WeSEE’s innate ability to identify parts of an image, as you see here:

I talked to the guys at WeSEE and got the full story:

“Image results on existing search engines display images that were indexed with tags and descriptions as the right results for you, relying solely on the description most of the time, which gives the user a bad experience and produces irrelevant results most of the time.

WeSEE is the only search engine that is focused both on visual and textual search.

The best part is that WeSEE Search discovers content preferences made by other users in different social media environments, it brings you only relevant images that were ranked or have been liked by other users, promoting a whole new social experience that revolves around finding new visual stories and getting inspired through visual search,” they say.

Guest author Haim Pekel is a marketer/entrepreneur and currently the Marketing Director of IQTELL.com, a GTD app that helps users to increase productivity by giving them a platform to organize to-do lists, complete tasks, and connect them to everything they do in one place. Haim also co-founded Retour à L’innocence, Vivre en harmonie avec soi, les autres, la nature magazine. Haim usually writes about startups, marketing, and productivity on Tech Cocktail and IQTELL’s blog. You can find him on his Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts.