Great web application to remember a face

So you know the name but don't know what the person looks like? Or you met a few colleagues and got their cards, but now can't recall which was who? Finally there is a good tool to help us with this common problem.

Our dear friend Faith McGary of kgb USA (formerly known as Infonxx, the people directory assistance company in dozens of countries and behind UK's 118118 for example) pointed me to the site of facesaerch (note the deliberate mis-spelling of the word search in the web address). Its a search engine that specializes on the faces of people. It seems to be very new, with very little web info about it and only a couple of bloggers talking about it right now. But it seems like a great idea. I tried it out on a few people, and for example our Alan Moore comes up second behind the "other" Alan Moore, which I think is very good performance. I also searched for several familiar friends of our blogsite such as our publisher Ajit Jaokar, who came out fine, Timo Kasper a dear friend and co-author with me of my third book 3G Marketing, which came out fine; but our third collaborator on that book, Sara Melkko was not found.. Its by no means perfect (yet) but a very good start. And I do like it that compared with the picture search on Google, this engine does deliver images of faces.

Of course like any good ego-maniac, I started to test the service by entering my name. Interesting, even as Ahonen is a very common name in Finland, searching for Ahonen brought my picture as the second one, after the famous ski jumper Janne Ahonen (no relation) who came first. Lots of more established Finns sharing my surname were down the line..  If I searched Tomi Ahonen, it found me of course, but also interestingly, searching just for Tomi did not get my face at all, but lots of other Tomi's from around the world, including of cousre many women named Tomi (which has caused a lot of confusion in the past haha) Thanks Faith, great find!

Comments

[Tim]

It must be a new kid on the block as it doesn't have extensive results as one might expect for a search tool. It does throw up some perverse results which makes you wonder what its search algorithm is based on. If you search for "kimmo" on google Kimmo Pohjonen comes up second. On this search device you have to give the full name to get a fourth ranking and then only limited entries. That said goggle images gets KP listed only on the second page after searching "Kimmo". Still a mystery then!!

[Franz]

thx for the coverage of facesaerch (p.s. you were the first blog to post about it).

i have gone into a new direction with http://www.facesaerch.com/update/

either visual social networking is on the rise, or i'm going to invent it.

cheers
franz, austria, vienna

[ve kredi]

facesearch is a good idea but it not works very well currently. For example i just searched for Tarkan, a famous singer, it was get correct results. i tried to search more and i see results not very good.

If they can develop a self learning mechanism, it may be really good service.