Microsoft Developing Photo Search

Microsoft this week revealed it's at work on a way to search the Internet using photos captured by cell phone cameras.

So rather than using a keyboard to enter an Internet search query, someone can email Microsoft a cameraphone photo of what they're searching for. Photo2Search, as Microsoft calls the nascent feature, returns Web pages either with information about the objects in the photo, or sites that contain similar images.

One goal of the research, as explained by Microsoft, is to augment the usual text inquiries with the details captured by photos. That combination makes for much more useful Internet search results, the firm believes.

News of Photo2Search comes a few days after Google, which views Microsoft as a chief rival, learned it received a patent for an alternative way to search the Internet using spoken words, rather than written text.

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=1434

Cool idea. But I want to see if it works first... I'd love to have a photo matching search site. Not just those going over restricted sets of e.g. Flickr images, but those with a crawl like Google Images.