Google Buys Shopping Search Engine Like.com

Disclaimer: This article was originally posted on my blog which can be found at tommaxwellblog.com

Google has officially acquired visual search and price comparison engine Like.com, according to an open letter that was posted on Like.com's website. 

“Since 2006, Like.com has been moving the frontiers of eCommerce forward one step at a time,” said Munjal Shah, the company’s CEO. “We were the first to bring visual search to shopping, the first to build an automated cross-matching system for clothing, and more. We didn’t stop there, and we don’t have plans to stop now. We see joining Google as a way to supersize our vision and supercharge our passion.”

Like.com launched in 2006 from the remains of Riya, a facial recognition search engine. The technology from that company was used after it closed to start Like.com's visual shopping comparison engine. 

Recently, Google has been testing out visual search and image recognition started with the "Similar Images" feature in 2009. The similar images feature uses image recognition technology to filter image results by similarity. It seems with this purchase that Google wants to go even farther with this technology.