14 DAY TRIAL // Like.com has confirmed that it has been acquired by Google. Rumors of the deal surfaced about a week ago, but the site has only now put up a notice saying that it has been bought by the search company.
“We were the first to bring visual search to shopping, the first to build an automated cross-matching system for clothing, and more,” the announcement on Like.com read.
“We didn’t stop there, and we don’t have plans to stop now. We see joining Google as a way to supercharge our vision and supercharge our passion,” it continued.
Like.com is an e-commerce site offering clothing, shoes, accessories and similar items. There's nothing revolutionary about that, but the core of the site are the visual search and image recognition technologies which power much of the experience.
This enables customers to search for items that are visually similar, which comes in handy when you don't know exactly what you're looking for or what goes with what.
At heart though, Like.com is a search engine and its distinctive features rely very much on the technology the startup developed. And it's this technology that Google wants.
Even though the acquisition has been confirmed, there aren't too many details on Google's plans with Like.com. While the visual search technologies are a good fit for some Google's own efforts in the space, that still leaves the question of what exactly will happen to the site.
Google has been doing a lot of research in advanced visual search and image recognition. Google Goggles is the product of that research and the tool is constantly being improved.
While Google Goggles is fairly impressive at this point, there is still a lot of work to be done until it will be accurate enough to be widely used. But the promise of 'searching' via images is hard to ignore.