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Well, we reviewed TinEye a couple of days ago and they were kind enough to give us an early invite into the beta, and we must say that we’re very proud to be a part of this one. We’re very impressed and we can certainly say that there’s a lot more to TinEye then what meets the eye. On to the review then!

Straight away, after the simple sign up process was done, we were really impressed with the homepage. The interface is very straight forward and simple. We would say it’s like Google, but we wont, as TinEye’s UI does justice to its own main feature. And here at Startup Meme, we just have a thing for websites that know how to use the white backgrounds well enough!

There are 2 options for the upload interface available, Flash and Non Flash. Unless, you’re still using a device which doesn’t support Flash ( iPhone anyone? ), you’d want to stick to the Flash version. The image can be either uploaded or you can just paste the URL of any image in JPG, GIF or PNG formats.

We first tried out the image search with our own images. I went first and this is what I got…

Ah well, I guess I’m not that popular yet, a tough one for my ego right there. So we went with something a little more popular then me. ( ok, maybe a lot more!)

Well, we got a lot of results. But the results are shown in a list, which isn’t really the most preferrable way to view them. We’d advice them to use the method with which they display search results in their Cool Searches as it’ll be easier to visualize without the scrolling. Or maybe something like coverflow or Windows XP’s Explorer Filmstrip view. Although you can compare images through the link given below the searched images to the query image which is very useful. This is the display of search results at the moment.

TinEye uses complex and intelligent algorithms to bring you results that will really blow away your mind. No more are you dependant on Google or Yahoo to find images similar to the ones you desire.

Last time, we complained ( just a teeny bit !) about how we would want to have some sort of text searching to TinEye to go through the huge index that they have. But our complain was answered once we logged in after getting our first search result. There is a plugin for IE and Firefox, which adds an option to search for an image with TinEye in the right click menu. This really is a nifty idea and saves a lot of hassle to go to the site, upload an image ( or copy/paste the URL ) for search. It just searches for the image right on TinEye and shows you the results.

Despite the 586 million images that they’ve indexed so far, TinEye’s search is very fast. They surely have optimized their search algorithms well enough to achieve this speed along with the accuracy in their search results. Also, you can submit your website, if you think its images haven’t been indexed and don’t show up in the search results.

Others have tried and failed but TinEye has the potential of being the next big thing in image search ( we think it already is! ). And we’ll try our best to catch up with TinEye for an interview shortly.

We can safely predict that as the TinEye’s index of images keeps growing, we’ll be gauging each other’s popularity  on the internet by the amount of search results we get on TinEye. An alarming prediction for me alone!

P.S. We’re giving away 40 invites thanks to the TinEye team. If you’re interested in being a part of TinEye, just answer this simple question in the comments box. The best comments will get the invites.

‘Why should you be given an invite and how can you benefit from TinEye?’