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It's taken years of time. Between designing the visual processing algorithms, assembling the resources to build a cluster and convincing/finding people willing to help out, it's been a ton of work. But it's also been a blast. And here are the (initial) results: the Incogna image search engine!
That's right, the search engine is finally scaled up and (hopefully) ready for more visitors. So, how do you use this thing? Well just click on whatever image you like to find similar images. You can pick one of the random popular images on the landing page or type in a text query and click one of the results to refine your search. It's that easy (or at least it should be). And don't mind the visually-matched sponsored images, although feel free to click on them if they interest you!
Special thanks to everyone over at the TTBE who spent so much time helping out "the little search engine that could" for the past...well, too long, anyway.
Enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.
Posted by Kris Woodbeck on 2008-11-25
I just wanted to say thank you to all of the alpha users who signed up and tested everything out, your suggestions and comments (and even a few bug reports) have been fantastic!
As a result, the following stuff has been done to the engine:
The only major thing that can't be done yet is "uploading an image" to search: Incogna has limited resources and all of the GPUs are busy indexing away. Once there are some more resources and Incogna can afford some new toys, an upload function will certainly be added.
Oh and the grant Incogna received last month (that I mentioned in my last post) was the Precarn T-GAP, thanks Precarn!
You guys have been great and I hope you're enjoying yourselves.
Posted by Kris Woodbeck on 2008-11-13
It's been a busy week.
First off, Incogna has obtained another grant (can't say which one until it's public). This will help to finalize everything for launch and get some more talent into the company within the next while. If you (or anyone you know) is good at GPU coding and is interested in image search (and wants a job), let me know.
Second, I was lucky enough to get 3rd place in the NSERC Innovation Challenge in Halifax on September 25th. It was great to meet all of the finalists and wow, there's some great research going on across the country!
And finally, for anyone interested in giving the Incogna image search engine a try, now you can! Incogna's cluster has (finally) been moved into new colocation facilities, the bits and pieces have been hooked up, and the engine is ready to take some visitors!
If you'd like access, just send an email and an invite will be on its way soon (for the early birds, anyway). Sorry, no fancy signup form, too many more important things to do!
Warning: expect bugs, it's alpha after all.
Posted by Kris Woodbeck on 2008-09-26
When it comes to search on the web, does size really matter? Cuil has made claims at a bigger image index than Google, but I haven't been able to do any successful searches on Cuil yet. While size matters, it seems clear that quality is a pretty important factor.
In fact, I think that the quality of the results is much more important than the mere size of the index. For example, let's compare Incogna's image index with that of our fellow image search engine: Tineye. Our current index is only about 10% the size of theirs, but let's compare the quality of identical image queries in the two systems:
versus 
versus 
versus 
Now you might argue that I've cherry-picked those results. But those results were easy to find, I urge you to try it for yourself.
One of our key assets is that Incogna's technology generalizes the shape of each object, which means that the Incogna engine can link two completely different pictures of the same object, building, scene, etc. In computer vision, that's pretty difficult. Oh, and we're also quite scalable too.
Another site that has a relatively "small" index (with 200,000 images) yet returns excellent results is Pixsta. As it turns out, maybe size isn't so important after all...
Posted by Kris Woodbeck on 2008-09-11
Here is a quick demo showing the Incogna search engine in action:
Stay tuned folks, we're on our way.
Posted by Kris Woodbeck on 2008-08-11