Search Engine Journal has news today about 3-D Seek, an engine now in beta testing that theoretically allows users to find what they’re looking for just by drawing a doodle with a mouse pointer. While you shouldn’t expect your notebook sketch of a Playstation Portable to yield useful results just yet – 3-D Seek currently draws its info from a catalogue of about 6,000 specialized harware parts – the technology is certainly intriguing (and hopefully improving).
3-D Seek was originally designed with manufacturing firms in mind, which explains its extensive catalogue of casters, couplings, pressure switches and other mechanical paraphernalia. But Imaginestics, the folks who built 3-D seek, felt that John Q. Public might be able to use 3-D Seek as the number of products it can search expands. For instance, if you’ve got your hands on a cracked pipe fitting from under your sink but have no idea if it’s a 9297-SN
or a 9297-CP, you might be able to ID the the part just by mocking up a little picture. The hope is that suppliers will provide files of their products to augment 3-D Seek’s own i-crawler web spider application.
Giving new meaning to the term “image search” comes with its own set of diffculties, of course. Says Imaginestics co-founder Nainesh Rathod:
“In order to make such a search engine commercially viable we had to overcome the challenge of matching something as rudimentary as a doodle to a 3-D object – in seconds…Our shape-search engine processes data that are far more complex then those handled by the leading Internet search engines, and yet still finds results quickly.
Fast, yes. Effective, hard to say; we’re not familiar enough with the look of, say, industrial joists to do a useful 3-D Seek test search for ourselves. And since it’s hard enough for the average PDA to learn to identify letters of the alphabet, something tells us Imaginestics will also have to cope with the poor and highly variable drawing skills of your typical mouse user.
