Image Search enables visual product and image discovery across three industries where text-based search consistently falls short: e-commerce, photo-sharing platforms, and textiles.
| Industry | Core problem | What Image Search does |
|---|---|---|
| E-commerce | Shoppers can't describe what they see | Returns visually similar product listings from a photo or uploaded image |
| Photo-sharing | Users lack words for visual queries | Searches tens of billions of images by visual similarity |
| Textiles | Buyers have fabric samples, not product names | Identifies matching or similar fabrics from texture analysis |
E-commerce
Finding a product online is easy when you know what to type. But when a shopper spots something they like — a pair of shoes, a bag, a piece of furniture — and can't describe it precisely enough for text search, they often abandon the search entirely.
Image Search solves this by letting shoppers search by image instead of words. Alibaba Cloud integrates Image Search into the Taobao app as Pailitao (snap and buy). Shoppers snap a photo of any product or upload an image, and Pailitao returns visually similar listings — no text description required. Since launching in 2014, Pailitao has grown from several hundred daily unique visitors to more than ten million.
Photo-sharing platforms
Photo-sharing websites and social networks store hundreds of millions or tens of billions of images. Text search alone falls short: users often want to find visually similar images but lack the words to describe what they're looking for.
Call an Image Search API operation to build a search-by-image engine on top of your existing image library. Users can then find visually similar images across tens of billions of images, improving both search precision and overall user experience.
Textile industry
Traditional textile businesses face a sourcing challenge: a buyer sees a fabric sample and needs to find suppliers for the same or similar material, but has no product name or SKU to search by.
Image Search brings visual search to Internet of Things (IoT) platforms in the textile industry. The fabric image search feature analyzes the texture in an input image and returns supply information for similar or identical fabrics. By combining information integration, image recognition, and big data, Image Search is revitalizing the traditional textile industry.
