GazoPa is a search engine using graphics (i.e. images), instead of text, for search input. Why is that useful? Because, as Hideki Kobayashi, GazoPa’s Project Leader pointed out, “Keywords are insufficient for accurate image searches”, GazoPa delivers more precisely because it uses shapes and colors to deliver comparable results to whatever you’re literally looking at and for. GazoPa is a start-up project within Hitachi.
Using GazoPa, upload any image, and GazoPa’s engine searches through a database of more than 80 million archived images, delivering you the closest images to your graphical query.
Kobayashi, noted its particular usefulness for consumer comparison shopping, especially when it comes to fashion. Simply plug in a graphical image of the high-end item you’re looking for, GazoPa scours the internet, showing similar, less pricey, items. Think of it as similar to sites like kayak.com for travel, in its quest for lower priced, similar items based on images as input.
GazoPa’s goal is to provide the service to consumers, ecommerce sites and photo sites. Given they’ve indexed more images than any competitor, yet can deliver quicker than any similar products, they’re proud of their technology.
In the past 6 months alone, they’ve moved from 30K to 70K visitors a month. Given their style search capability was launched 2 months ago, Kobayashi is now betting on traffic increasing and declared that they’re ready for it!