Visual search is a convenience is searching. Instead of the usual typing, people can just use images to look for the things they want. Practically useful on services that have plenty of images for products.
The auction site eBay has thrown itself to also have the feature when it announced 'Image Search' and 'Find It On eBay'. Under development, the feature is coming to users on both eBay app and mobile platform.
The 'Find It On eBay', for example, is designed to leverage social media platforms or web browser, and eBay will surface listings of the item in that image or others like it. The 'Image Search' allows users to take a picture, or select an existing picture on their mobile devices, and conduct an eBay search based on that selected image.
Both 'Find It On eBay' and 'Image Search' take advantage of algorithms and machine learning to allow shoppers on the site to use images when searching for matching items.
The AI uses deep learning and computer vision to determine the similarities between images and other objects, and learns how to prioritize its findings. Since eBay has a lot of images (1.1 billion live listings, as well as its troves of past sales), this visual search feature should learn quite a lot before being released.
As a result, it also should help shoppers by giving them a different user experience.
"When you upload images to run Find It On eBay and Image Search, we use a deep learning model called a convolutional neural network to process the images,” said eBay in a blog post.
"The output of the model gives us a representation of…your image that we can use to compare to the images of the live listings on eBay. Then, we rank the items based on visual similarity and use our open-source Kubernetes platform to quickly bring these results to you, wherever you are in the world."
The features also show eBay is steps closer to a concept that was offered its CEO Devin Wenig earlier this 2017. At the time, he imagined people taking pictures of stuff they want to sell and eBay automatically fills titles, descriptions, listing information and even prices.
"We want to make the entire internet shoppable by the image," said Mohan Patt, eBay vice president of buyer experience.
Demoing the features, Patt used a picture of knee-high black boots he took from a magazine. He then fed it to eBay, and retrieved more than 500 live listings of the same kind of boots. The intent wasn't to get the identical item, but provide a range of similar looks and prices for customers, he added.
Pinterest, Google and Amazon are all having this feature to quite some times now. Since eBay has acquired three AI-focused companies to make this feature possible, customers should expect a better eBay experience in the future.