Tineye is a different sort of search engine. Instead of using captions, filenames, and surrounding text to search for images using words as the criteria, Tineye employs actual images as its search input criteria. Either upload a file to Tineye or point Tineye to the URL of the image online, and it instantly creates a digital "fingerpint" via a number of proprietary algorithms -- and searches this on-the-fly fingerprint against its database of crawled and indexed image fingerprints. Their database of images is currently around 487,000,000 -- still just a fraction of the tens of billions of online images and the four billion-plus images Boujnane estimates Google has indexed via syntax to date. Boujnane expects to pass the billion-image mark "very soon."

Boujnane stresses that first and foremost, Tineye is a search engine. The purpose of Tineye is to facilitate image-based search -- plain and simple. In other words, Tineye is not policing the web for copyright infringements: it is simply crawling the web for identical and very similar images. Tineye will point out the URL of identical and similar photographs, but the onus of copyright protection lies with the asset's owner. To put it another way, Tineye is not Idée PixID system -- which is a high-end intellectual property protection solution and service based on similar identification algorithms. If you discover unauthorized usages of images through a Tineye search, and are so inclined to pursue a course of legal action, it is up to you -- Idée does not get involved.

Signed up.
Logged in.
Tried it.
Didn't work for any of the images I tried it with.

Summary: Right now, it sucks.

Hey Tawiskaro, thanks for 'testing' the site and giving feedback; seems like it worked better for you than digitalpharaoh. What Tofu posted says that the site is still growing its image base and has a ways to go - if they get there it could be a useful site.