Searching Images

If you want to find an image on the internet, you can usually find a relevant picture using Google's Image Search. But the Google search matches text, not the image. Glyn Moody points us to a cool new plan which will allow you to search images on the web using images. This idea sounds awesome, and I wish them the best getting it off the ground.

This reminded me of something I've been hearing about for the past couple of years. Those of you with an ear to the ground in the Drosophila bioinformatics community (yeah, all five of you) are familiar with Sudhir Kumar's FlyExpress program. Kumar and colleagues created a database of published pictures of embryos which you can search using your own images. This service allows you to identify genes with similar expression patterns as your favorite gene. Now if we could only get Sudhir to get rid of that damn Hummer.