Search without Words: The ViSenze API
January 5, 2016
I read “GuangDa Li, Co-Founder and CTO ViSenze on Enabling Search without Key Words.” The article, I wish to point out, is written in words. To locate the article, one will have to use words to search for information about Dr. Li. Dragging his image to Google Images will not do the trick. The idea for search without words continues to attract attention. Ecommerce and law enforcement are keen to find alternatives to word centric queries. Searching for a text message with a particular emoji is not easy using words and phrases.
According to the write up:
In February 2013, GuangDa Li along with Oliver Tan, an industry veteran started ViSenze, a spin-off company from NExT, a research centre jointly established between National University of Singapore (NUS) and Tsinghua University of China. ViSenze has developed a technology that enables search without keywords. Users simply need to click a photo and ViSenze brings you the relevant search results based on that image.
The write up contains several points which I found interesting.
First, Mr. Li said:
Because of my background in internet media processing, I anticipated the change in the industry about 4 years ago – there was a sharp rise in the amount of multimedia content on the internet. The management, search and discovery of media content has become more and more demanding.
Image search is a challenge. Once promising systems to query video like Exalead’s system have dropped from public view. Video search on most services is frustrating.
Second, the business model for ViSenze is API focused. Mr. Li said:
ViSearch Search API is our flagship product and it also serves as the fundamentals for our other vertical applications. The key advantage of ViSearch API is that it is a perfect combination of latency, scalability and accuracy.
The third passage of interest to me was:
We used to be in stealth mode for a while. Only after our API was launched on the Rakuten Taiwan Ichiba website, did we start to talk with investors. It just happened.
I interpreted this to suggest that Rakuten recognizes that traditional eCommerce search systems like Amazon are vulnerable to a different information access approach.
Should Amazon worry about Rakuten or regulators? Amazon does not worry about much it seems. Its core search and cloud based search systems are, in my view, old school and frustrating for some users. Maybe ViSenze will offer a way to deliver a more effective solution for Rakuten. Competition might motive Amazon to do a better job with its own search and retrieval systems.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2016
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