TinEye is an image search engine that goes beyond the usual search engines like Google Image search. You can upload a photo to TinEye then it shows you the similar images on the web. This is quite useful if you want to find out who is using your own images or want to find out the original version of an image you found on the web.

TinEye works with pattern recognition search engine, when you provide an image to it, it creates a fingerprint of the image and tries to match with already indexed images and then returns results. Currently the index is not as big as Google but i think it does the job atlease for Ionut. (see below for an update)

“TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks. TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.”

Sounds interesting, the site is currently in betabut you can request an invite if you wish to test the service. Via [Google OS]

Update:

TinEye folks are kind enough to let me in to test the serice and as said before it just works. Of course if you through some random image to it it may not identify it given that the index is very small. I tried it with Eiffel Tower photo and it returned similarl shots of Eiffel Tower. This is one of the app to watch how it turns out in the near future.