An innovative image search has been launched by System One Labs, where you can simply draw a rough sketch of what you're looking for, and have results returned from Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service within seconds.


Retrievr from System One Labs


The simple flash based interface allows you to draw a sketch of what you're after in a box on the Retrievr site, and have 20 photos retrieved from Flickr on the right of the page.

Results during our half-hour trying it out seemed a little mixed depending on how detailed (and well drawn) the sketch was, but with a bit of practice and use of suitable colours the system was able to return some scarily accurate results - sometimes finding what we were trying to draw but not making a very good job of!

Whilst visual searching isn't anything particularly new, it is clever that such a simple to use system can provide results back from a public gallery of photos which themselves don't have detailed descriptions accompanying each and every image. Could this be the end of keyword searching? As they say, a picture's worth a thousand words...