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The unique website I bring you today reminds me of a game my family once played. The game was called pictionary (i think). The game involved sketching items on a notepad and scored according to how many correct items your team got. The game was always good for some laughs. It is so hard for me to draw an image that a I can so vividly and distinctly picture in my mind.

The undiscovered website I am reviewing today searches for pictures based on the characteristics of an image you draw on their site. If you draw as well I as I do then don’t try to seriously search on this site. However, I did have fun playing on the sketch pad at retrievr. Most of the searches I performed came back as something other than I intended.

OK, let me tell you how it works. They give you a sketch pad and different size pens. You get to draw an image and then the search engine goes out to flickr and somehow tries to match up what you drew to pictures on file. I tried to draw a tree and kept ending up with people. I tried to draw a boat and got a bridge with people. I tried to draw the sun and got people. Here is what the website says about is functionality:

retrievr is based on research conducted by Chuck Jacobs, Adam Finkelstein and David Salesin at the University of Washington: Fast Multiresolution Image Querying (1995).¹

I first came across the algorithm when someone (I think Edd Dumbill) linked to imgSeeka couple of years back; imgSeek is a standalone image management application that incorporates that algorithm as well.

retrievr is a new implementation in pure Python (and a host of great libraries: Fredrik Lundh’s PIL and aggdraw as well as numarray). The front end has been created using Helma and Macromedia Flash.

While I am impressed with the creativity and unique characteristics that has went into this project, I can certainly see why it has not made it to the forefront of technology yet. The sketchpad is a tad to small to draw anything other than stick objects and it program started searching at times before I was through drawing. The accuracy of the images returned we not good either. Although, I must say for those of us trying to up our page hits, site rank, and always looking for an edge in SEO … all we would have to do is put up a bunch of people’s pictures on our site and taadaa, each time someone drew something they would be directed to your site with people. That was my frugal attempt at humor. 

Summary

A fun new concept that if it worked as intended would make searching for images more fun for certain. In its current form this unique website is entertaining but not that useful.

To visit retievr and play with the gadget go to: http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr