Riya launches Like.com

Finally after 8 months since Riya 1.0 launched, we launch our new product Like.com in the middle of the Web 2.0 conference.

URL: Like.com
What: Like is the first visual search engine where you can click on / submit a photo as your search query
Index: Like searches merchants sites for Jewelry, Handbags, Shoes, Watches. 200 merchants 2M SKUs

Like.com is the world first visual search engine. We focused visual search on items that are hard to describe linguistically. Think about it, you don't need visual search to search for an iPod ... but you do need visual search for finding a shirt with a pattern similar to your friends. When it comes to design oriented or aesthetic elements, text search tends to fail you. Try to describe the pattern on a plate of china in text. It is really hard.

Like solves this problem. All you have to do is a "Likeness search" on a photo and Like will show you items that look similar.

Some other features of Like include:

• Likeness Search – the ability to search by image instead of text;
• Like Detail – finds items that have a specific feature you like (such as a buckle, straps, bezel, etc);
• Like Color – find color variants of the item you desire;
• Like Celebrity – find clothing, shoes and accessories similar to those worn by celebrities;
• Like Upload – the ability to upload a photo of your favorite item and find similar (coming soon)

Over time we will more categories (visual search can apply to clothing, home & garden, furniture, and even landscape photos) and items (we are adding 30K items a day). So while Like starts with only 4 categories we will continue to expand it over time.

I hope you all enjoy it. ;-)

What about Riya - it will still stay as a face recognition product at Riya.com. We will continue to improve it over time (albeit slower). The company name is still Riya.

Below are some photos of the Riya team (US and India)

web2con
web 2.0

Comments

[Adam Lindemann]

Well done Munjal. It looks and works great! My wife loved it too and it was interesting to see how intuitive it was for her to use.

[/pd]

Great going !! Now how do I upload a pic and look for likwise images ?

Munjal, all the best on the Reluanch efforts and a kudos to the Team !!

[Janet]

Fantastic job guys!! :)

[Rahul Pandhe]

Hey Munjal,
Now I see clearly where you are going with Riya. This makes so much sense. I always thought there was nothing "Natural" about "Natural Language Search". This on the other hand is truely "Natural Search". Almost like "What you see is What you Get" for Search.

I can only imagine the engineering efforts behind such an undertaking.

Indeed a great job and awesome invention.
And also your blog series will serve as inspiration to many a founders to come.

Rahul Pandhe
GiftWisdom.com

[frum]

Congratulations! From reading your blog you guys have worked really hard.

[O. Haffar]

Awsome product, I am going to write an article about you on my Web 2.0 news website utank.net. This is truely a unique platform and you have just touched the tip of the iceberg.

Corporations will be going crazy over this !!!

[Sunny Aggarwal]

Excellent product, inspired effort really. I am a software developer myself and i can hardly begin to imagine the endless possibilities the product heralds. Once you allow people to upload photos and search, I can see emerging firefox extensions, mobile applications (what with people on overdrive with their camera phones) and what not. I suggest you start yourself (or have u already started) with a mobile app to wrap around the Like engine. This has the potential to take window shopping to an altogether different level. I just hope that you can make the visual search more generally applicable and not bound by product categories.

[jal]

hey munjal!!!
congrats..
best regards..
say hi to your son...

[damikey]

Really a great idea, when new ideas are hard to come across.

[Stephan Spencer]

Fantastic job!

When you demo'ed the likeness search technology at the Web 2.0 bootcamp at the Shop.org summit, I was really impressed. Now I'm floored!

This has the potential to change the way people shop online. Exciting!

[Alexander Straub]

You are not alone out there with Riya! Do you remember me from the good old Andale days. I used to be the CEO of mondus the Oxford startup (we visited you once in the Valley with one of our Oxford employees (I believe a friend of yours) ; at the same time when you ran Andale.

Good to see you are competing again in a similar space. We should enjoy the race. Pixsta our London based company has been developing similar technologies at R&D to Riya over several years and we are now commercialising it. Feel free to vist us in London and on our website at Pixsta and explore our image search machine specializing in shoes only on ChezImelda.com. "We call the worlds largest shoe store" All the best to you and team at Riya / like.com - Alexander Straub

[aditya]

Hi Munjal,

Awesome Job, This is a great application of the image search. I would liek to know what was offensive about my comments earlier that you removed it

[Munjal Shah]

Aditya,

Your previous post under the article titled "Coverage of Like.com" is still there - maybe you missed it?

[aditya]

oops Sorry ! false alarm, please remove my previous post now :)

[john may]

Visual search using nearest-neighbor searching within a multidimensional feature space using kd-trees for indexing fails because human perception does not use a nearest neighbor feature space search at all, or anything like it. The only way to accomplish a reasonable visual search is to combine nearest neighbor feature space search and a large number of hierarchical heuristic analyses to pre-sort images into a number of bins, and do visual search within the bins. Even then the results will be far less than optimal. Your demo is carefully crafted to hide the large set of flawed results - that's the only way to sell this technology: bend the backend data until the frontend looks good.

You will remove this message. I will seem very wise when your money runs out. Good luck, sincerely.

John May

[Sumeet]

why is the traffic doing down?
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=www.like.com&url=like.com

Have to spend more moeny on marketing.

[Munjal Shah]

Marketing is coming but as I said on another comment - don't confuse traffic and sales to merchants - last week we sold more good (in terms of $) than any previous week despite having less traffic. Many of our early users were just technology lookers... only after a few weeks have the core buyers found us and are now driving our sales.

[wulansari]

Some people spend thousands of dollars on new computers, and then buy a cheap chair from their furniture or office supply store, without giving a thought to their ergonomic health.

[dilip behera]

hi mr munjal,

Its our pleasure to see you on ndtv profit live on 16thnov at 10:30 in
india wonderful presentation of lifestyle with family being an indian we are proud to have u as an enterpenure.BEST OF LUCK

REGARDS
DILIP BEHERA
EX VP BUSINESS DEVLOPMENT
BANGLORE BASE DOTCOM COMPANY
919988735800

[dilip behera]

hi mr munjal,

Its our pleasure to see you on ndtv profit live on 16thnov at 10:30 in
india wonderful presentation of lifestyle with family being an indian we are proud to have u as an enterpenure.BEST OF LUCK

REGARDS
DILIP BEHERA
EX VP BUSINESS DEVLOPMENT
BANGLORE BASE DOTCOM COMPANY
919988735800

[brooklyn custom furniture]

A Brooklyn based furniture company serving customers in all Boros of NYC. specialize in brooklyn custom furniture, office furniture, wallunits