Search by Sketch
I just gave 3D Seek’s sketching search engine a try. It’s pretty impressive: sketch a mechanical part and it will provide images that it thinks may match your sketch. I sketched a simple triangular bracket, and while there wasn’t a perfect match, the search results were compelling enough that if I were looking for that part, the listed vendors would probably get a call from me to find out if they had more stock not represented here or could make a custom part. Note that the tool is presently in Beta and does not appear to support Firefox.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about searching through multimedia content: pictures, sound files, video, etc. Current popular resources like Google Images don’t use automated mechanisms to classify the actual content. Instead, they either look at the text around the media files or a real live human being provides the “indexing”. 3D Seek is, at least for now, targeting mechanical parts which greatly simplifies the image recognition problem in numerous interesting ways. These simplifications make it little more than a novelty for anyone not looking for a relatively simple mechanical device, but its success in doing so is quite encouraging.
Should you start picking your website images for ease of sketching to attract users of these kinds of search services? No, we’re still a very long way from that.
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