Search for Your Face Online

I admit it; I love the TV show “Vegas”. One of the things I always found fascinating in that show was the facial recognition tool they use in the security room. It is great the way they scan through a database of faces and find a match to someone they just video capped from the security cameras. It’s basically a search engine for faces.

What if everyone had access to this database, what if you could search for a face online or even the opposite, find a face and click it to get detailed info on who it is. Well, you’re not going to have to wait long. A new search plug-in coming from Polar Rose will allow you to do just those types of searches.

The plug-in is due to be launched in beta during the first quarter of 2007 and will be available for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. According to Polar Rose, you will be able to click on a persons face and find out who they are and some data about them or enter a name and see a collection of photos of the person. They claim it will work on any photograph publicly available online. I can already imagine the outcries of the security zealots out there, but that is a topic for another article.

Looking at the big picture however, I think challenging the basic notion of how search works is the most interesting aspect of this new tool.

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