Gazopa is a new visual search engine that is “a venture project inside Hitachi”.

I tried its Facebook application. I uploaded a few standard images and a few test images of my own and ran Gazopa. Some of the matches were awful while others were sort of meaningful. See for yourselves. The first match is displayed under the target image.

Gazopa also found a cropped copy of the “cameraman”, but not a rotated copy. The inability to handle rotations is a common problem with almost all visual search engines. Pixcavator Image Search can handle rotations with ease (read about it here or wait for the last version – to be released soon).

As far as the underlying technology, the site says that “GazoPa enables users to search for a similar image from characteristics such as a color or a shape extracted from an image itself” and nothing more. So, even what they consider similar is unknown.