Has Google Met Its Match?

LEVAN is a new visual search engine that’s taking on Google.

Remember doing school projects in the old days? First stop was often a dusty encyclopedia and then maybe a rifle through the paper catalogue card drawers in the library?

Nowadays, the first stop nearly always includes the term, “Google it”.

But what happens when Google just isn’t cutting it? When you just can’t find the exact thing that you’re looking for, but you know that if you could just see it, as you can see it in your mind’s eye, your problem would be solved?

A new visual search engine called LEVAN could be the answer. LEVAN, which stands for Learning Everything About Anything, is essentially a visual encyclopedia.

It’s designed as a fully automated system that learns everything visual about any concept, by processing lots of books and images on the web. For example, let’s say you are looking up ‘dance’. LEVAN will search through millions of Google books to learn about all possible variations of dance – but here’s the clever bit - instead of throwing up a whole lot of results that don’t have visual connotations like ‘the last dance’ or ‘dances with wolves’. LEVAN will only show those results that have visual resources that actually relate to dancing.

LEVAN works out which terms are relevant by looking into the content of images found on the web and identifying characteristic patterns across them using object-recognition algorithms. This clever program is actually learning as it goes along and the more people use it, the smarter and more accurate it gets – all this is done completely automatically, without any human supervision.

Once you identify the picture of the thing that you’re looking for, LEVAN then links you through to a Wikipedia page for information about the item, and your research project can be launched from there.

Funded by the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, LEVAN is an open source program that will expand and grow as more people use it. Currently, there are 171 concepts to search from, with over 50 million images that have been processed, but if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you just add your own concept and LEVAN will do the rest.

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au