Google has just bought search and price comparison engine Like.com, it was reported on the latter’s website recently. Google had to shell out $100 million for the popular eCommerce website.
Since 2006, Like.com has been moving the frontiers of eCommerce forward one step at a time,” said Munjal Shah, the company’s CEO. “We were the first to bring visual search to shopping, the first to build an automated cross-matching system for clothing, and more. We didn’t stop there, and we don’t have plans to stop now. We see joining Google as a way to supersize our vision and supercharge our passion.”
Like.com launched in 2006 from the remains of Riya, a facial recognition search engine. While that company is now gone, Shah used the technology behind it to build Like.com’s visual shopping comparison engine.
Recently, Google (Google) has been experimenting with visual search and image recognition. In 2009, Google launched Similar Images, a tool that uses image recognition technology to filter image results by similarity. The tech titan also overhauled Image Search last month, but the Like.com acquisition indicates the company wants to do more with image recognition.
According to TechCrunch, Google paid upwards of $100 million for the visual shopping engine. The company raised around $50 million in three rounds of funding.
