EyeEm announces two key hires to further develop the world’s best visual search engine

 

 

Photo-sharing platform EyeEm is continuing to double down on search with the addition of two new hires, Sriram J. Sathish, previously of Yahoo, and Harsimrat Sandhawalia, previously a robotics engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. Together, they join Appu Shaji, Head of R&D at EyeEm, to put into hyperdrive the development of the technology behind EyeEm's search engine.

Kickstarted by the acquisition of talent from Shaji's computer vision startup sight.io, Sathish and Sandhawalia are helping to more accurately contextualize EyeEm’s search engine. This contextualization means that than relying on users’ pre-defined keywords for EyeEm's search engine to crawl through, there are underlying algorithms and analytics that intelligently sort through the images based on visual content. Furthermore, once the related images are found, EyeEm’s search presents the most aesthetically appealing images first, based on focus, composition and other characteristics.

There's plenty of room for improvement, but already EyeEm has a healthy headstart on the contextualized seearch engine. For example, searching for ‘couple on the beach’ or ‘a car drifting’ will provide extremely relevant images, presenting the most appealing images first. 

To some, this might seem like a small improvement for a single company, but it’s implications go much further – especially if EyeEm is ever to be acquired down the road. Rather than users relying on uploaders to correctly tag and keyword images, the search engine can analyze and create a visual archive of what images are on their platform. As time goes on, the search engine will become more and more intellegent.

If you’d like to try it out, you can head on over to EyeEm and search for yourself.