Microsoft Looks to Photos for Search

Microsoft is working on a way to search the Internet by submitting a photo shot by a cell phone to represent what the user is searching for. The effort is part of a bigger project by Microsoft Research called Photo2Search to make search technologies more usable on cell phones. The search engine would return Web sites that match items in the photo, or similar photos found across the Internet.

By including the details of what a photo captures, Microsoft says the results produced are more useful. According to Microsoft researcher Xing Xie, "the value of camera phones on daily information acquisition" has been overlooked. The findings are planned to be released in mid-May as part of a larger research paper titled "Photo-to-Search: Using Camera Phones to Inquire of the Surrounding World" in Nara, Japan.