Some call it a time-waster. I think it’s fun.
Retrievr made Slashdot today. With retrievr you can search the collection of images in flickr by drawing with your mouse in a little sketch pad, similar to MSpaint. Submit your drawing to the Retrivr search bunnies and you will receive a screen full of flickr photos that match your drawing. From the searches I ran it looks like colour matches take priority over anything else.
The drawings I made – squiggles and basic shapes – really took shape once I saw the images that returned. It never occured to me that the purple semi-circle and a red dot was someone’s hair and mouth. or a bowl of flowers. or a flock of birds.
Text-based queries are so passé, if you’ve got Flash installed you’ve got to try this out (once the traffic from Slashdot lets up).
Features I would like to see added:
- allow users to fine tune the search by adding some text based tags as delimiters.
- a finer brush option definitely
- a way to refine the results
The site is officially slashdotted as of 11:11AM Eastern – give it awhile but definitely play!