Sorry there was a bug, but already fixed it

We found a bug at username registration process of drawing. Some users might have failed to publish their drawing due to this bug. We're sorry for it. We already fixed it and now you can publish your drawing with your username smoothly. We test before releasing new features, but unfortunately, sometimes bugs still remains. We do our best to minimize bugs, but if you find some points needs to be improved, please feel free to contact us.

New Feature 'Rate search results of drawing'

We released new feature that enables users to rate search results of drawing just now. Search by drawing is one of the most popular features at GazoPa. It is unique way to search photos by your drawing. Today we added an interactive feature to it so that users can share their feelings with others. Actually, it's not so easy to get awesome results at first. But you can also encounter various kinds of images accidentally. It's our pleasure for us to provide users many opportunities to touch images.

Being interactive is a keyword at current web service. This new feature is the first and small step for us to integrate social and interactive functions to image search.
Please give your feedback.

English and localization

Since our website support English, user’s accesses come from all over the world such as USA, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, Hungary, China, Thailand etc. Of course, it’s easy for everyone to understand images comparing to social media that culture plays big role. But if our website is written in Japanese, not so many people access to it even though they are full of images. So English is the important tool to communicate each other in the world. As I wrote before, there’re many nice web services in Japan, but people in other countries don’t know their existence due to no English support. I suggest new web service should support English so that it can have enormous users.

But I don’ think English become the language for all people that is used at daily life and world before the tower of Babel will never come. People also like to use web services that support their mother tongue. That’s why Google support many languages in the world, although I don’t know how many languages they do. Many languages should be supported if search key is other than English. We focus on search by images, but we also have a function to search images by keyword. So, localization is also in our to-do list in future.

Which language we should support next?

How many images are there in the world?

Facebook announced that they hosts 10 billion images last week. Wow, so many photos! Also, CNET reported that photobucket hosts 6.2 billion photos and flickr hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago. There’re also lots of photos in your PC. How many images are there in the world? No one can calculate it correctly, but it is certain that the number of images will increase dramatically. Searching for images becomes important and scalability of search is a critical point. That is why our service attracts many attentions. Currently, the number of searchable data at GazoPa is more than 50 million, since we’re crawling the web continuously, our cover area is increasing. I’m not sure when we can reach to the goal, but we should know ‘The longest journey begins with a single step’.

Why do you search for images?

According to ComScore/TechCrunch, the number of unique visitors to Google image search is nearly half of ones to Google web search. This figure may be more than you expected. Why do users search for images? Some users have objectives such as looking for publishing material, getting inspiration for making art works and getting to know people’s faces that are much talked about etc. Some users search for images for fun such as knowing latest news, looking for cute images and seeing beautiful places.

Albert Mehrabian’s research mentions that non-verbal elements are very important for face to face communication. Words accounts for just 7% of message delivering and visual information makes much bigger role at communication. This is the study for face to face communication and not for web communication. But I think importance of visual information is also same at web. It’s pleasure that GazoPa can help users to find visual information. Again, why do you search for images?

Web service from Japan

It is regret that WEB2.0 Tokyo was canceled due to cancelation of some speakers. It might be due to finance crisis in USA. As you may know, there are some characteristics in Japanese web market. Yahoo Japan dominates search market and Japanese origin mixi is the No.1 SNS provider rather than MySpace and facebook. Mobile phone is so sophisticated and it is called ‘Galápagos’ i.e. since its market is very unique and isolated, it is not easy to penetrate into other markets.

It is said that almost all web services in Japan come from USA. But I don’t think Japanese has no originality in web service. Japanese market is big enough for start-up and there are also language barrier. These are reasons why presences of Japanese companies are not so clear. But at TechCrunch50, 3 companies from Japan made presentation at its stage, although no companies participated in it last year. GazoPa is one of the honored teams who made presentation. I think world become more wonderful if many companies from different origin provide web services.

One Month Old

One month has passed since we launched our private beta at TechCrunch50. We received many request of beta participations, feedbacks and proposals since then. It was a really nice debut for us. Google celebrated 10 years of anniversary in last Sep, and we just celebrated 1 month. There are many search engines that live in history such as Alta Vista, Infoseek etc. On the other hand, new search engines such as powerset, hakia, cuile etc are also born one after another and GazoPa is also one of them. 17 years has passed since WWW was developed. 17 years, 10 years and 1month. Don’t you think history of search engine is very short and there are still many rooms to be developed?