ALIPR - Another approach for photo search.

ALIPR:- Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Picture- real time.
Pretty interesting indeed. I have been saying it for quite some time, that common image search which google or for that matter any other search engine does is not up to the mark. Riya broke the mould and they once again did it with Like. But what they did was something with great fanfare , here alipr is a site which is being developed without any fanfare, and thus might not be attracting any big crowd. ALIPR is more of a scientific taste and does not have any tadka of commerciality.
It is being developed by Jia Li and James Z. Wang.
As its title indicates they are trying to classify an image using words. Their system have a vocabulary of 332 English words, which though is not big in figures but is highly effective.

ALIPR version 1.0 is designed for color photographic images. ALIPR 1.0 is not designed for black&white photos, manipulated photos, objectionable images, cartoons, sketches, framed photos, etc. ALIPR's prelude was our ALIP system, published in 2002.

They are doing some great job in image annotation. For more of there work go here.
Future of image search is in meta data or computer analysis.
They are basiclay on research project so we might just not see them on web 2.0 map, but yes they are doing there bit for web 2.0 by their own way.