New feature ‘flow’

We released new feature ‘flow’. ‘flow’ is the feature that helps users to enjoy various images. Users don’t need to set parameter such as color, shape. These parameters are set automatically and various images are displayed based on parameters. Users only need to click ’flow’ below the key image and ‘flow’ starts.

Basically, search requires activeness, but not all users want to click search button many times. This ‘flow’ feature helps users to enjoy image search comfortably. Just click ‘flow’ below the key image. Enjoy it!

GazoPa is two month old!

Two months have passed since we launched GazoPa in private beta. Almost all the bugs have fixed but unfortunately, there are still some failures at user registrations process. (If you can’t register successfully, please contact contact (at) gazopa.com). Some suggestions from users have not been realized. One of the biggest changes from launch is the feature we released last week, i.e. rating of search by drawing.’ Shuffle and recommendation were also features that were released after launch. Some changes are not easy to be found by users, because those are not changes of UI. One of the examples are tuning up of image features. You can get better search results by this change.

I have been asked by not a few users when GazoPa would be open to public. How many months does it take for new projects from private beta to open to public on average? Some are a few months and some are more than one year. It seems new search engines have longer stealth period than other categories. Since we are in the category of search engine, more than one year is required for private beta theoretically. Just kidding.

Actually, we plan to release some wonderful and important features by the end of this year. We also need to increase searchable data. Please wait for a while patiently.

Every day GazoPa

Which web services do you use every day? Google is my daily search engine and I also use YouTube, facebook, twitter, LinkedIn not every day but often. Former TechCrunch writer, Mr.Duncan Riley wrote he used Evernote, Things, Skitch, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Grooveshark. I have used some, but not all of them. We use some web services everyday because of fun, time saving, killing time etc. Although technology is developing and new services are generated every day, unfortunately, our time remains unchanged. If we share our time with new service, we need to shorten our time for using other services or stop using them. Some people may cut sleeping time in order to enjoy them. We want GazoPa to be a daily tool for everybody. This is why we released ‘Ranking of search by drawing’ last week. We’d like to release new features continuously so that users touch it every day.

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’.