Monthly Archives: June 2007

Google Image Search Supports ImgType=Face

Google Image Search has supported the imgtype parameter for a long time and it recently received an upgrade, now accepting an imgtype with a value of face.

At the moment, there isn’t an option on the advanced search page to restrict images to that imgtype, so you’ll need to add it into the URL manually.To give you an idea of what it might be useful for, compare to two search results:

The first set of results are anything that has been associated to ‘Alistair Lattimore’, where the latter is meant to filter the results to contain faces. In that particular example, it isn’t perfect however it’s quite easy to see where this is going. This new functionality is apparently the by product of a Google acquiring Neven Vision last year who were developing specialist facial recognition software.

Gold Coast Real Estate Agents Suck

Claire and I live in an apartment/townhouse at the Gold Coast, with people on both our side walls and above us. We’ve been in our current apartment since December 2004 and we’ve discussed moving into something different.

That idea got put onto the hot plate this week when I called our new on site managers and asked about what I needed to do for them to move out. That discussion lead into us exchanging information about our apartment and her finding out for the first time that it is actually for sale. She was a little shocked about that, since the real estate agent hasn’t informed her nor have they been going to her to get to get a key for our apartment to show people through it.

Being a little confused by the whole thing, she started calling around to find out what was going on. We were very surprised to find out that our apartment has in fact been sold for over a month now and that the Gold Coast real estate agent didn’t think it important to inform the body corporate managers or the current tenants! You can probably guess what is coming next, the new owners intend to move into their new investment in about two weeks.

With that much notice, we’re now hunting at a fairly rapid pace for a new home to move into at the Gold Coast somewhere. We’re not interested in moving into another gated complex, nor are we fussed on sharing walls with people again. Our neighbours in the last two and a half years have been far too inconsiderate to want to go through that again, so we’re looking for a standard house.

We’ve submitted an application to a nice four bedroom house in Pacific Pines, cross your fingers we get it.

Google Acquires DoubleClick

April 13th saw Google finalise a deal to acquire online media and advertising heavy weight DoubleClick Inc. The announcement from Google states that they’ve purchased DoubleClick for USD$3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity.

The interesting thing here isn’t that Google have purchased yet another monster business but that they are one of the biggest forces in the online advertising landscape. DoubleClick currently service a different type of online advertising client than Google, so the DoubleClick business will definitely complement Google’s online advertising strategies. More importantly though, Google gain all of the technology that DoubleClick have been developing which focuses strongly around rich media advertising. I expect it won’t be long before we see Google start to aggressively roll out rich media advertising into their current products such as Google Video and YouTube and subsequently into the wider market as well.

Interesting times ahead for online advertisers, the internet landscape is changing yet again.