Finding the right item on eBay is about to get a lot easier with the auction site adding visual search to their mobile site and app.
There are two new features announced called Find It On eBay and Image Search, and though they’re not quite live yet they’re coming soon.
The Find it on eBay option allow you to share images from any social network like Pinterest, Twitter or just any website to eBay to attempt to track down the item for you. Simply share the image, which you can crop down to a part of the image if there are potentially several items included, and the eBay app will do the rest.
The Image Search function works essentially the same way, but this is based on photos you take yourself. You can take a snap of anything you want while in a store, at a friends house and attempt to track it down on eBay.
eBay is using computer vision and deep learning to feed a convolutional neural network that processes images and searches through the nearly 1.1 billion items listed on their site. The results are ranked on visual similarity, so you may not find exactly what you’re after but it will be close.
eBay will be rolling out these new features to the Android app in ‘the Fall’, so in the Spring here in Australia. The Android app is getting both Find it on eBay and Image Search, while iOS users will only be getting Image Search, at least initially.
