Munjal talks and the world listens… I know we’ve had a few blog conversations over the past few weeks between Munjal, Neil and me about Riya’s web design. Munjal has also religiously blogged about the genesis & evolution of Riya including the most recent shift in strategy from a face recognition software tool to a “visual” search engine.

Today, it’s OFFICIAL!

“It will be a “visual search engine” – give Riya an image and it will return image results that are similar from across the web. They’ve already begun crawling the web for images, a process that will take many months.

When it’s ready, users will be able to search on an image (the easiest way will be via a browser plugin to search right from the page containing the images).”

Given below are news items published in the different web news outlets:

(i) TechCrunch
(ii) Silicon Beat
(iii) Search Engine Blogs – here and here
(iv) Other Bloggers – Ben Barren, RexBlog and Venkatesh

I know, I had given Munjal some grief about the marketing look-and-feel of the front page. Munjal has actually followed up similar comments with an open call for Riya’s “homepage re-design”. I have been thinking about it and realized that it’s easy to criticize and condemn the creation of others, but it’s a whole new ballgame if you try to constructively improve upon it.

So, I’ve decided to take a stab at the homepage re-design from a marketing perspective. I already have some interesting ideas that I plan on sharing with Munjal and look forward to the reincarnation of Riya with bated breath.

Have a smashing weekend! Mine is gonna be spent dreaming of a marketing spin for the “new” Riya.

If you’d like to participate in the open call, check out Munjal’s post for more details.