Looking for vibes that really match yours?
A new visual search engine may be the answer. Same Energy is a new web tool (still in development) that’s perfect for anyone looking for visual inspiration - It’s an AI-powered visual search engine that provides a fast and simple experience for exploring visually similar photos.
The website was created by Canadian developer Jacob Jackson, who launched it last week.
You can start by providing one or more keywords, uploading/dropping a photo, or by clicking one of the featured images on the homepage. Every time you click a photo in the grid on the screen, a new search is performed to identify visually similar photos, and the new results fill the screen within seconds.
Speaking to News18, Jackson says “I was playing around with search using machine learning and made a version for tweets first. But I realized image search was the most promising application."
The images aren’t your usual run of the mill stock photos, or sourced from a singular limited database. The images are from Reddit, Instagram, and Pinterest. “Since they’re not in the public domain, we operate as a search engine and link back to the original images, like Bing or Google Images," explains Jackson. “You can right click (desktop) or long press (mobile) any photo to see the original source," he adds.
How does the process work? “The choice of which images to include is mostly random. We do use AI to tag and filter out explicit content," explains Jackson. Currently, it indexes 19 million images shared on Reddit, Instagram, and Pinterest.
“We believe that image search should be visual, using only a minimum of words,” says Jackson. “And we believe it should integrate a rich visual understanding, capturing the artistic style and overall mood of an image, not just the objects in it. We hope Same Energy will help you discover new styles, and perhaps use them as inspiration.”
You can try out the site below.
Time to share what I've been working on for the past couple months: a visual search engine called Same Energy. It's early stages but you can try the beta here: https://t.co/VhZ4ylwp2g pic.twitter.com/r1tHIfenYk— Jacob Jackson (@Jacob__Jackson) February 4, 2021
“The principal advantage of our search is that it works without any tags or metadata: all we need is the image,” says Jackson. He’s considering selling API access to the visual search as a business model for Same Energy, but for now the project remains free to use, ad-free, and unmonetized.
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