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I'm a pretty big fan of the new startup Riya, if you haven't seen it, it's a social networking web application that uses facial recognition software to create the social links. Basically you upload your photo's and the application detects the faces and you give each face a name, it's pretty cool, if not a little scary.

Anyway they recently announced that they were expanding the searching so that you could upload a picture of something and you would get back search results related to your picture. I think this is fantastic, I'm really surprised that Google with all their PHD's haven't come out with something similar.

I'm also annoyed that Microsoft haven't added anything innovative like this to the searching in vista, imagine being able to search your hard drive for something like 'joe' but then maybe something like 'joe outside' or 'TV', sure some of the inputs might not be textual but I'm sure that wouldn't be a major issue. We know that MS has some of this technology from it's research department, I remember watching a channel 9 interview, one of the researchers showed this DirectX application that had facial recognition and the ability to know if it was outside or inside, I guess this stuff ended up in the big black hole between research and production.

Well I hope Riya can continue to innovate and keep ahead of everyone else and please Riya think about creating an IFilter pulgin for the windows search system. I just keep thinking about how cool it would be to search my hard drive for specific items in a picture.