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Quote:Become.com kicked it off with the "shop by color" feature (shown here looking for a purple tie).

Then Smarter.com upped the ante with the "Smarter Visual Search (shown here looking for a Hawaiian shirt).  BTW, I totally dig the Smarter.com robot guy, but wouldn't he fall right over with those big arms paired with those little chicken robot legs?

Now image search company Riya is launching www.like.com which was featured in the November 7th WSJ.  Like shows you images from celebrities and allows you to pick various items they are wearing and then runs a CSE-lite on them so you can find them online.

This takes the visual search idea and instead of making it a feature, makes it the main way to shop...

Quote:eBayers just experienced a huge surge in post-Thanksgiving traffic but now they have another reason to celebrate: The visual-search shopping site Like.com is adding eBay items to its database within the next few weeks.

"We are automatically adding eBay items in the categories of shoes, handbags, jewelry and watches, so we will be driving people to buy from eBay without them having to do a thing," Munjal Shah, CEO and co-founder of Riya, the San Mateo-Calif.-based company that created and operates Like.com, said yesterday.

Referring to people who own stand-alone Web shops, Shah said, "If you have a feed or a link, then just ping us, send an e-mail, and it may take a week or two, but we'll get you listed. Having an affiliate program helps because our business model is such that we make money by referring leads; you pay us when you get a click or a sale, we do use both approaches."...