Like.com

» see like.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Image similarity search is roughly what I do for a living now, pointed at drones instead of handbags, with twenty years of hardware and method that Like.com never had access to. That is why this particular grave holds my attention. In 2006 the same problem was being shipped as a shopping site, and it worked well enough that people used it on purpose, which given what the field had to work with then is a stranger fact than it sounds.

Like.com came out of Riya, which had spent two years building face recognition for personal photo libraries and had discovered that nobody would pay for it. Munjal Shah and Burak Gokturk took the same vision work and asked a question with money behind it. Like.com was announced at the Web 2.0 Conference on 8 November 2006. You picked an image and drew a box around the part you cared about. It came back with products from partner retailers that matched on shape and pattern.

The company raised $19.5 million. Google had tried to buy Riya in 2005 and walked away at the last moment, then came back five years later for what Riya had turned into. The acquisition closed in August 2010 at a figure widely reported around $100 million, which is a lot of money for a shopping site and a reasonable price for a computer vision team in 2010.

~ the case file ~

~ what it could do ~

This was before convolutional networks were something you downloaded on a Tuesday. Matching a handbag to a handbag meant hand-designed descriptors for color and texture, sitting on top of an index that could still be searched at web speed. Every part of that was work. The catalog was work too, because somebody had to go and negotiate feeds from retailers before there was anything to search.

The business under it was affiliate commissions, which is why fashion was the category. A shopper who finds the shoe is a shopper who buys the shoe, and the retailer pays for the introduction. Like.com had the rare property of being a research demo with a real revenue line attached, and that is exactly what made it worth $100 million to a company that mostly wanted the researchers.

~ the boutiques year ~

Google launched Boutiques.com on 17 November 2010, a fashion site built on Like.com's vision stack with curated shops and a style quiz on the front. It got a month of press. By April 2011 traffic was down 94 percent from launch, to somewhere near 170,000 visitors a month, which for a Google property is a rounding error.

In September 2011 Google mailed the remaining users telling them to save anything they wanted to keep. On 14 October 2011 Boutiques.com and Like.com both stopped being products, and every URL on both was pointed at Google Product Search.

~ what replaced it ~

The vision work did not die with the site. It went into the similar-items feature inside Google Shopping and from there into the visual search that now sits behind Google Images. If you have ever photographed a chair and been shown four chairs that look like it, you have used what is left of Like.com, without the site and without the name.

English Wikipedia dates the death to 2015, uncited, which probably describes the domain redirect finally giving up rather than the product. The product ended in October 2011. like.com does not answer at all today, which is unusual for a five-letter dictionary word owned by Google.

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