This topic describes the application scenarios of Image Search, such as e-commerce, photo-sharing websites, and textile industries.
Image searches for e-commerce
To enhance the user experience of searching for products online, Alibaba Cloud integrates image search services into the Taobao app in the form of the Pailitao (snap and buy) feature. Since Pailitao was launched in 2014, the number of daily unique visitors has increased from several hundred to more than ten million per day. The steady growth indicates that an increasing number of consumers have adopted the search by image method for online shopping. Unlike text-based searches, Pailitao allows you to search for products by snapping a product photo or uploading an image. You do not need to enter text-based product descriptions to search for products. This simplifies the procedure for online searches and improves the shopping experience.
Image searches for photo-sharing websites
A large number of users have access to the Internet and smart phones. An increasing number of photo sharing websites and photo social networks are emerging. In most cases, these websites store hundreds of millions or tens of billions of images. However, most of the websites support only text-based searches. Image Search allows you to call an API operation to build an image search engine. You can use the image search engine to search for images among tens of billions of images. This improves search efficiency and user experience.
Image searches for textile industries
Traditional textile industries have implemented image search technologies on the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. The fabric image search feature identifies textures in input images and allows you to obtain the supply information about similar or identical fabrics. The technologies of information integration, image recognition, and big data are revitalizing the traditional textile industries.