Rakuten is testing out visual search for its e-commerce site in Taiwan. The technology, developed by ViSenze, allows shoppers to upload a photo to the site and use that photo to search for similar products.
This feature is meant to work with photos users take on the street as well as images they see online, but it can’t yet handle complex images. In this test, the search engine returned striped shirts seemingly in response to a background with banded shadows.
Reminiscent of Google Shopping, the tech is a step in the right direction but needs some finessing before it can hope to win over shoppers.
