File this under "interesting." The people at idée have created a new search engine that works more like a reverse lookup, not for phone numbers or word searches, but for pictures.

Upload a picture, and TinEye looks up all of the places that image appears all over the internet using proprietary image recognition technology developed by idée. TinEye will even find alterations, crops, and edits of the image. The first images in the search results are those most like the uploaded image. Quickly compare the images from the search results to the picture you uploaded.

You can install a bookmarklet that can be used to search any image embedded on any webpage to which you browse. I'm not sure this will work with flash embedded pictures.

Watch the video below, or visit their site to learn more.

Currently only about 600,000,000 web images have been "fingerprinted." But idée is in the process of crawling billions more. I can't immediately think of any time I've ever wanted to lookup the uses of an image around the web, but perhaps that was because, save for blind tag searches, doing so was impossible. And, if you're like me, you're always thinking about where new technology will take us. Where might this be going?

You can also visit idée's blog.

TinEye mobile, for the iPhone, will let you take a picture of the cover of a CD and return more information from iTunes, allmusic.com, YouTube, and Wikipedia. The iPhone app store has another software application that allows the user to snap a picture of a billboard, DVD cover, CD cover, etc. and will return product information about the item in the photo. I don't recall the name of it, as, not seeing a personal need for it at the time, I didn't download it.

How would you envision using TinEye in education or otherwise?