• Red Herring, Friday, December 22, 2006 11:02 AM

Google gets lavish praise in the press. But guess what? Google Image Search sucks. It doesn't have a comprehensive video search, and its Web search engine still delivers too many false pages that are (conveniently) filled with nothing but Google AdSense links.

Thankfully, the nimble universe known as the World Wide Web encourages startups to fix problems that bloated corporations don't have time to address. Polar Rose, the image-search company which announced its product earlier this week, uses a mapping technology to remember faces in 3D. Once you tag your photos using its software, the company's search engine should, in theory, be able to identify the same face across the greater Web.

That means you could snap a photo of someone, upload, and instantly find information about him or her on the Web. Creepy, right? But it's also a valuable sounding technology, and one that could change the search game.

Some pundits believe the search movement is going vertical. Specialized search is an area that needs improvement, namely, better local, health, gaming, video, audio and music search. And Google isn't there yet. The lure in creating search technology is advertising. Google has proven the model, but there are still many new areas to mine.

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