I helped build a similar tool at 99designs. I blogged a bit about how we built it here: http://99designs.com/tech-blog/blog/2012/08/02/color-explore...

It uses R-trees to index colors in the Lab color space to do fast perceptual nearest neighbour color search.

We open sourced the code behind it too, so you can implement search by color type features on your own set of images:

https://github.com/99designs/colorific - for extracting colors from images

https://github.com/dhotson/colordb - for doing fast perceptual nearest neighbour color search

very nice and simple, thank you

This message is displayed when you try to search for more than 5 colours :)

"In accordance with common sense, decency, propriety, sobriety, and the Revised Search Limitations Act of 1742, we respectfully inform you, our dear user, that the number of colours searched upon must not exceed 5. Thank you for your cooperation."

I did not expect much from this - perhaps the same image with different color filters or somesuch. I'm pleasantly surprised: this is an ass-kicking tool and should be converted into a Photoshop plugin post-haste. And it has a sense of humor too. Very impressed!

shameless plug: i recently completely rewrote "Google Search by Drawing" from scratch -> http://search-by-drawing.fullstackoptimization.com/

on github https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/search-by (MIT license)

the reason for the complete rewrite / V2 is shameful. the first version was deployed to heroku in 2011, then i never touched it again. last month i deployed a minor change to the fron-end html (of the old version https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/searchbydrawing), deployed to heroku again, the app crashed if you clicked on "search", it crashed silently. i tried to debug it on heroku (pain in the a) as it worked perfectly on my local setup.... after a wasted weekend i rewrote the whole thing in half a day (now EC2 hosted). shameless plug story end.

Allow me to point you guys to a project we did 4 years ago at the Exalead labs that does just that: http://chromatik.labs.exalead.com/

Unfortunately, this is another in a long line of websites that die if you nuke Google Analytics. It's becoming a persistent problem.

Curious, so I looked. I figured they fire off tracking events when you click on the color swatches and yes, they do: onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/labs/flickr');".

I'm assuming you have JS enabled but have analytics domains blocked? Might be a good idea for site owners to start wrapping these pageTracker calls in try/catch statements.

I'm using Ghostery to block the load of the Javascript, and I imagine a few other HN readers do too. It's strange that they never considered that the GA tracking events might fail.

Recent versions of Ghostery (and NoScript) both provide 'surrogate scripts' to replace common JS resources that are expected to work by the active page.

You can see the noscript[1] ones at about:config (search for noscript.surrogate.*) but I'm not sure where the Ghostery ones live, or if it has specific ones for different trackers, or just a generic handler.

[1] GA replacement code appears to be (reformatted):

    (
    function(){
        var _0 = function(){
            return _0;
        };
    
        _0.__noSuchMethod__=_0;
    
        with (window) urchinTracker=_0, _gaq={
            __noSuchMethod__: _0,
            push:function(f){
                if(typeof f=='function') f()
            },
            _link:function(h){
                if(h) location.href=h
            },
            _linkByPost:function(){ return true },
            _getLinkerUrl:function(u){ return u },
            _trackEvent:_0
        }, _gat={
            __noSuchMethod__:function(){ return _gaq }
        }
    }
    )()

I'm using Ghostery, It's blocking GA, the site works fine.

I'm using RequestPolicy to block that domain, but the site works fine for me.

Works here and I got GA blocked in the router.

This is a great tool for designing web pages, but I'd like to be able to filter on licence types; I'm not so interested in images I cannot use in my web page.

They claim all the images are CC:

> We extracted the colors from 10 million Creative Commons images on Flickr

But not all CC licenses are the same. Anything with NC isn't usable on a site with adverts.

So it'd be nice to have some checkboxes for the Creative Commons license types. Include/exclude Commercial, Derivatives, Attribution.

This is fantasic! And kind of addictive. I used to use Tineye regularly for backwards-image search until Google unveiled their own. It's awesome to see that Tineye is still innovating. I hope we see more products from these guys in the future.

Is this a fast index to 10 million histograms with a json output?

Can anyone think of a nice Web-App idea that could implement this?

I was thinking, instead of having this as a raw search engine (which is nothing short of EXCELLENT!), maybe you could use it to find foods that looks alike? Something, maybe?

Come on guys, I know you're much more creative than me :)

Off the top of my head, and it's not great, but you could use it to select colours for an outfit and have it return a selection of clothing that matches the colour range provided.

Actually, it's a pretty slick idea mate! If you had a good marketing team, you could target big studios with this one :D

This is really nice but the colours are somewhat artificial, thus the selections are somewhat biased towards man made images. I suggest using smaples of colours from real images, such as real skin, sea, sand etc.

I don't understand what you are saying. The artificial selection of the default colors? Well, you can edit the colors to any html colors, which is about 16 million...

Do you mean that the algo sorts on decreasing color frequency? i.e. you choose "blue" then the top results are images that are literally all "blue".

Usually when I want an image with a specific color, I don't want the entire image to be that color...

I get what you're saying. Maybe you could throw in a lower bound of the hue variation of the image as a parameter into the search to find "natural looking" images but with prominent fields of the desired color.

wut

You can choose almost any color in the visible spectrum.

You can also source a color and paste it has hex.