They could do a lot of things you said thanks to Neven Vision technology.
You have good ideas Philipp (twins on orkut is great).

Great idea re-Google Street View...Apparently someone is working on facial recognition software as well for Street View...Scary, huh?

[Signature removed. -Philipp]

Wonderful. I will use this pattern matching idea. Auto match. auto. Do you research Facebook? A good platform. Maybe can do some apps based on the idea at facebook.

Google Images Explorer :) I wonder where you got the idea from :))

I actually described this idea to you before Alex, around over a year ago (not in the context of Google, of course).

Oh well ideas are in the air, it's almost impossible to know who tought about them first. What matters anyway is to make them real.

Yeah, I agree... and the pattern explorer is a trivial concept other people thought of & implemented before (in slightly different ways), the only problem: how to scale it so it runs fast with many images (and how to store all those images)?

Google Copyright Search –

For the copyright owner of an image to be able to search for where the image is used on the web to see if the uses are properly licensed.

For a graphic designer to find the provider/owner of an image they like or have seen (or scanned from print) so that they can license and use it.

The service could also read embedded metadata

see also highend image comparison and web crawling services form

http://ideeinc.com/

and

http://picscout.com