Tineye

Tineye's playful logo is painted on their HQ, on Toronto's Queen Street East.

Tineye is a software firm that rolled out a reverse image search engine. Unlike a convention text-based search engine, where the user requests a search for web-pages with a particular string of text, tineye users supply the search engine with an image, and it returns web-pages with a version of that image.

Tineye doesn't just provide web-pages with exact matches of the image in question. It can recognize images that are cropped, images that are of different resolution, images that have been altered.

Tineye's own web-page went live in 2008, three years before google added a reverse image search feature to its own search engine.