Two free apps, CamFind and Blippar, claim to be your best option for visual search. In a recent video the two apps were put to the ultimate 2016 test: Could they identify Donald Trump from a picture and tell the user about him?
This sort of search technology can be incredibly handy when you don’t know who or what you are searching for. The technology still has a long way to go before you start using it over traditional text-based search engines like Google, but in specific situations where you can take a picture of whatever it is you are trying to identify or learn about, this is at least worth trying. Note that Google also has computer vision-based image-based search.
For what it is worth, we did some quick testing with the apps on our own and the results were similar to what happened in this CamFind comparison. We generally found CamFind to be very accurate, even with items we thought would be fairly difficult. Blippar, on the other hand, seemed much less accurate and took longer to show information it thought was relevant to your search.
Don’t take this as gospel, though. We would need to spend some time on a full comparison and review of these apps before we could conclusively say which is more effective. But as far as corroborating the results of this CamFind comparison video, our test appeared to suggest their video accurately portrayed the two apps.
Be careful if you download them, since visual search can be addictive and you may find yourself wasting hours trying to stump the app.