The Facebook Engineering blog outlines the custom-built infrastructure used to manage 60 billion images on the social network. Fascinating stuff, talk about fixing the airplane engine during flight.

Needle in a haystack: efficient storage of billions of photos

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The Google Labs blog talks about Similar Images.

Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the right image if you can’t describe it in words. The new Similar Images feature was developed with just this in mind. Using it you can now find images that look like an existing result simply by clicking on a link. Using visual similarity, you don’t have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link of an image you like.

I wonder if this functionality could be used for my image search feature for dating sites. You know the one I’ve been talking about, where you are presented with a gallery view of search results and you can click on people you like and the grid will be re-populated with similar-looking users.

Another cool Google Labs tool is News Timeline. Look at the PlentyOfFish timeline I created. Easy and useful, just how I like it.

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