Canadian Startup 'Incogna' Is A Game-Changer For Image Search

Congratulations to Ottawa-based Incogna.com on the public launch of their visual search engine. Founder Kris Woodbeck has been working long and hard at perfecting the art of image searching, and by all accounts the public launch of Incogna's unique technology is a landmark moment in the search industry.

What makes Incogna so different than anything else out there? On the surface, the answer seems quite basic. Instead of searching the text in the title/tags of the image, Incogna actually searches the pixels of the image ie, the image itself. Sounds simple enough, but executing this concept effectively is extremely complex and took some major out-of-box thinking by Woodbeck.

Most existing image search engines only do a ‘meta-tag search’ – they only look at the labels for each image. Instead, the Incogna engine processes the visual information contained in each image, and does this using strong hints from cells of the brain’s visual cortex.

“Today’s leading search engines are great at searching text, but are at a loss when it comes to visual data,” says Woodbeck, who has already garnered numerous awards for Incogna, including being named Innovator of the Year in 2007 by Ottawa University. “They provide a ‘best attempt’ at image search by ignoring image content, which forces users to sift through pages of irrelevant search results. The Incogna engine effectively ‘sees’ each image and is able to organize images at an unprecedented scale and speed by harnessing cutting edge multi-core graphics processors.”

We're excited for Kris and the whole Incogna team and I'm sure there is a lot more exciting news and features that will be coming from Incogna over the coming months. You can get a detailed explanation of what Incogna does and how it does it by watching this video demo:

Incogna Image Search Demo on Video.ca

While this video is great, there is no substitute for actually kicking the tires on the hottest and newest search engine out there. Go check out www.incogna.com now and start searching images in a whole new way!

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Canadian Startup 'Incogna' Is A Game-Changer For Image Search

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