Google muscles in on Canadian startup

For the past two years, the founder and chief executive of Toronto’s Idee Inc. watched and waited for Google Inc. to upgrade its search engine and enable users to enter pictures instead of text to perform Web queries.
As the creator of TinEye — a reverse-image search technology that allows users to figure out where a photo came from, how it is used and whether modified versions of it exist anywhere on the Web — she had a feeling Google would one day add similar functionalities to its flagship search engine.

On Tuesday, Google took the wraps off a series of upgrades to its mobile and PC search technologies, which included Search By Image, an extension of the company’s Google Goggles image recognition technology.

“I have always known that Google will eventually release a search-by-image feature,” Ms. Boujnane said. “They are a search giant after all. My initial reaction was: it’s about time. I have been expecting this in every single release for the past two years.”
For many technology startups, the prospect of a technology giant co-opting their creation, building it into their core platform and rolling it out to their millions of existing users is nothing short of a nightmare.
But Ms. Boujnane doesn’t see it that way. Instead, she feels that her company’s strategy of licensing its technology to businesses differentiates it from Google, a consumer search engine.
“Google has put searching by image at the future of search,” she said.
“This is no longer a nice-to-have feature, it is a must-have feature, which will drive mobile commerce and enterprise search. Good for Google. Good for us.”

Still, for many companies, whenever a Google, Facebook Inc. or Apple Inc. unveils new software and developer tools, which might contain new features or services that could potentially make their own offerings obsolete, it’s cause for concern.
When Facebook launched its Places service last summer, it was immediately compared to the social check in service Foursquare. When Apple unveiled iCloud this month, some of the features were deemed to be a threat to application developers who had created Web-based sharing services for the iOS platform.
Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who led the search upgrade announcement on Tuesday, said in an interview that some of the technology contained in Search By Image came from the company’s Google Goggle project and that Google wasn’t aware of TinEye’s service. He said Google approaches all search innovations from the perspective of improving the user’s experience.
“As soon as we look at a problem — either based on feedback from our users, or our experience in search — and we believe we should develop a certain product which would help the user’s search experience, then we approach the problem in two standard ways,” he said.
“If there are small, intelligent technology startups that can reduce the time to development, we clearly talk to them and we look at their innovation out there, and we acquire numerous companies. In cases where we feel we can just do a much better job of building something that we want to build, and we just put together a team and build it.”