Riya launches Like.com, visual search for shoppers

(Credit: Riya)

Earlier this year, Riya launched an extremely cool face-recognition system for your family photos. Today at the Web 2.0 Conference (but not during the Launchpad sessions), Riya said it is launching its next product, Like.com, a visual catalog and search tool for consumer goods.

The site lets you search for items by keyword. Once you find a picture of one you like, you can find more that look like it. You can also adjust sliders to tell the system that color is more important to you than shape (or vice versa), and you can zoom in on a feature of the product and search for more products that share that feature. In the demo I saw, CEO Munjahl Shah zoomed in on the three subdials of a watch to find more watches with the same configuration. Robert Scoble of The ScobleShow also got a demo. See his video.

The site is launching with data on shoes, handbags, watches, and jewelry. Like.com has catalog info from 200 sites and has over 2 million products, Shah told me.

Clothes, furniture, plants, and other goods are coming. Also in the future, you'll be able to upload your own photos and use them to kick off searches, and you'll also be able to take a picture from the Web (say, of a celebrity at an awards show), zoom in on their clothes, shoes, watch, or glasses, and find items that look like what they are wearing.