PlinkArt users will notice that we’ve just pushed a new version of the PlinkArt app to the Android Market. There is nothing new in this version, other than some information on the shutdown and an easy install link to Google Goggles.

We hope everyone got lots of enjoyment out of playing with PlinkArt. We certainly had fun making it (and even learned a thing or two about art along the way). Visual search is not going away, and we’re excited to part of building the future with Goggles

All the best,
Mark & James

We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today. Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up.

For Plink as a company, it’s been a short but exciting ride – only four months since our public launch. We shot past 50,000 users in just four short weeks, and we’ve continued to get great feedback and suggestions over the months since then. For all our users: nothing is changing. PlinkArt will continue to be available for download and work as it currently does today. However, we won’t be updating the app and will instead focus our development efforts on Google Goggles, so you’ll see new functionality appearing there in the future.

The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

We’ve had a phenomenal reception on the Android Market. Things started with a bang thanks to our prize in the ADC2. Even better, in mid-December we were selected as an official featured app on the Market, which catapulted us past 50,000 users in less than four weeks. We’re still growing, and it’s great to see more and more users trying Plink every day. Android users are very engaged, and we’ve had a constant stream of thoughtful feedback. So thank you everyone!

Image Search – A New Kind of Popular

Now that we’ve been around for a while, we’ve accumulated lots of data about the kind of things users have been doing with the app. One of the fascinating things has been the dramatic difference between what’s popular for visual search, compared to text search.
Our most popular text queries are what you might expect – big name artists like Picasso, Dali, Monet and other favourites:

On the other hand, many of these artists aren’t even in the top 10 for image search. Instead we see artists like Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish art deco painter whose name you may not recognise, but whose paintings you certainly will:

The Mona Lisa still comes out on top, but the diversity of what users search for with images is strikingly higher than with text. This is the top ten:

We started Plink because we wanted to bring the power of visual search to everyone. It’s very cool to see users playing with the technology and finding new and interesting things that they wouldn’t have come across otherwise. So – a successful beginning for PlinkArt. However, visual search is about more than just art, and we think this is gradually going to become a natural component of more general search engines. Just like with our painting rankings, it’s going to help people find all sorts of things that aren’t so easy to get to with text alone. That’s what keeps us excited about building visual search engines. That and the fact that it’s a lot of fun!

Congratulations! Your application, Plink Art, was chosen by users and judges as the #1 winner in the Education/Reference category. You’ve won $100,000!

We’re really happy that users liked the app. We’ve already had loads of suggestions of new things people would like to see in PlinkArt, and the Android prize means that we can keep working to make cool new features.

Now that the ADC2 is over, we’ve released PlinkArt on the main Android Market. It’s completely free, and you can get it  just by searching in the Market app, or by scaning the 2D barcode in the sidebar of this blog. So give it a try, and tell us what you think!

–The PlinkArt Team

Anyhow, now for a bit of frantic server scaling to make sure we can handle the load from the finals

Without a painting handy, so far everyone we’ve shown the app to has taken a photo of a friend instead. PlinkArt only knows about famous paintings, so it returns the most similar one it can find. Given that European painters spent hundreds of years painting religious figures, normally this is a saint – except in the case of one poor fellow who apparently bears a close resemblance to a Campbell’s Soup Can. (Really, for these searches the system knows that it hasn’t found a good match, so we could return a “nothing found” page. But people were having so much fun figuring out what famous portrait they looked like that we decided to leave it in!)