TinEye claims to be the world’s first reverse image search engine.  Rather than typing in a phrase and looking for a picture, you type in a picture and get other pictures like it – or something like that.  Thanks to the TinEye add-on for Firefox, you can get instant image searching done right from the browser.

Here is a little more about TinEye from it’s developers:

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches.

TinEye does not typically find similar images; it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

Once installed, you can right-click on any image, and select “Search Image on TinEye”.  When you do, you’ll be taken to an TinEye web page, that will display your search results.

It might not be a tool for everybody, but I do find the idea of reverse image searching very interesting and fun to play with.  You can learn more about it at TinEye.com.