What's Not to Like?

Sapna Satagopan | November 21, 2006, 04:26 PM

Right before for the holiday season, Like.com [alpha] launched a couple of weeks back. The creators had earlier launched Riya.com, an intriguing search engine that used facial recognition to enable photo organization and sharing. Now the creators are trying to replicate a similar idea for shopping search, using visual recognition of objects to find others of the same type. My search for a leather strap watch is here. CEO Munjal shah gave a quick lowdown on the site.


The potential of Like.com is exciting. It enables the 'can you show me more like this?' mode of shopping in the truly visual sense of the word. Some of the fun features are celebrity style search [Want a pair of shoes similar to Sienna Miller’s?] and slider bars for colors specifications. The ‘What do you like about this item’ feature is especially cool. Like.com allows me to mark out the portion of the product that I especially like [the three-dial feature in the watch] and choose to focus on that particular shape/size or both. While the search results did not always come close to the original product, they were of a similar type, which works fine for now. Keyword-based search is possible, as well as search-history.

For marketers, the current option to be included in search results is via feeds. Like.com seem to have the regular suspects such as Amazon.com, Shop.com, etc in the vendor kitty already. Spidering the web would be fantastic, and possibly in the future plans. But spidering for visual content has it challenges-I suspect the text-based search will play a stronger role than it does now.

The road ahead includes rapid category addition, given the proximity to holiday shopping season, and other interface and accessibility developments poised for the next few months. The interface takes a wee bit of getting used to, especially that the ‘likeness search’ button that doesn’t really stand out noticeably enough [seems more like a font-size and color-contrast problem to me]. Navigation could be smoother, but with the small number of categories, it hasn’t inconvenienced me much as yet.

I am currently writing a report on optimizing content for multimedia search engines. For agencies working with retail clients, it seems to come as no surprise to find that low volume traffic seems to be sourced even from Google Images Search. While Like.com is still some time away from proving impressive traffic numbers, for marketers who own the multimedia content such as images, this should be a good time to start thinking about optimization tactics for search engines.