Online Holiday Shoppers Prefer Sleigh Beds to iPads When Using Visual Search

SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Superfish, Inc., a developer of visual search technology, today announced the top online visual searches for holiday shoppers (boots, furniture and watches), highlighting the significant differences from the top word-based searches for tablets, iPods and iPhones.

“I was recently shopping for a new chair”

“Holiday shoppers are voting with their clicks and telling us that there are many products that can not be described with words and conventional text-based search engines,” said Adi Pinhas, co-founder of Superfish. “While text works well when a user knows the specific brand and model of the product they are looking for, a picture can deliver a more valuable search result for many products. The only common item we found between visual and text search were shoes.”

Over the holiday shopping season, the Superfish platform has been serving visual search results from its catalog of 150 million products at a rate of more than 200 per second for the more than eight million users of its WindowShopper add-on for product visual search.

Superfish’s WindowShopper is a browser add-on that can be downloaded for free at www.superfish.com. Based on Superfish’s unique visual search technology, it enables online shoppers to mouse over any product image and instantly see the same product or visually similar products offered at leading retailers, including Amazon.com, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, eBay, Toys R Us and others.

“I was recently shopping for a new chair,” said Jillian Orrico, of Foster City, CA. “I found one online that I liked, but I wanted to see others like it. I had limited options for the way I could describe it with words, such as black or lattice. By using Superfish’s WindowShopper, I was able to find similar chairs to the one I liked with a single click. I used the image of the first chair as the query in the same way people type text for a Google search.”

WindowShopper is based on the Superfish Visual Search Engine, the first and only technology to analyze an image algorithmically and deliver similar and identical images in real time without the need for text tags. This ability to deliver similar image results is an extremely complex mathematical problem that Superfish has solved through a proprietary patent-pending algorithmic process.

Top 10 Holiday Product Searches from Visual Search (source: Superfish Platform data)

1. Men’s Basketball Shoes

2. Sheepskin Boots

3. Nubuck Boot

4. Sleigh Bed

5. Bean Bag Chair

6. Cocktail Table

7. Fireplace

8. Electric Turkey Fryer

9. Digital Watch

10. Dial Watch

Top 20 Holiday Product Searches from Text Search (source: http://pulse.ebay.com/)

1. Android tablet

2. iPad

3. iPod

4. HP Touchpad

5. Shoes

6. iPhone 4 unlocked

7. iPhone 4

8. Coach Handbags

9. Hello Kitty

10. Kindle

About Superfish

Superfish is a visual search company that has developed the first and only technology to analyze an image algorithmically and deliver similar and identical images in real time without the need for text tags or any human intervention. This ability to deliver similar image results is an extremely complex mathematical problem (orders of magnitude more complex than delivering identical image results) that Superfish has solved through a proprietary patent-pending algorithmic process. Initial applications of the Superfish Visual Search Engine are in the consumer-focused Web browser add-on “WindowShopper” product comparison tool, and Superfish Visual Search for the Web, a platform that enables browser add-on, extension and toolbar developers to instantly monetize their apps with a product comparison feature.