Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: Why didn't Google come up with this 10 years ago? Click on a feature on the map -- a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout -- and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It's remarkably fast, simple to use and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it -- and for under 35,000?

A simple Google image search highlighted on Twitter has been said to highlight the pervasiveness of racial bias and media profiling. "Three black teenagers" was a trending search on Google on Thursday after a US high school student pointed out the stark difference in results for "three black teenagers" and "three white teenagers". Kabir Alli of Virginia posted a clip to Twitter of himself carrying out a straightforward search of "three black teenagers", which overwhelmingly turns up prisoners' mugshots. He and others erupt in laughter when the result for "three white teenagers" show stock photos of smiling, wholesome-looking young people. The tweet has been retweeted by more than 60,100 users and favourited nearly 55,500 times since it was posted on Tuesday – but Alli's video was later reposted by World Star Hip Hop, an entertainment website with an enormous following on social media.

Stock photo giant Shutterstock is boosting its artificial intelligence (AI) credentials today with the launch of a new reverse image search feature within its iOS app. The New York-based company offers more than 80 million images for bloggers and media outlets, but keyword searches aren't always the most effective way to find images relevant to a story. If you want to search for photos that are similar to ones you already have in your possession, or if you want to find alternative photos based on the shapes, mood, color scheme, and general mise en scène around you, reverse image search comes into play. You can search Shutterstock by using the camera on your iPhone or the photos on your camera roll to find similar images. The launch comes three months after Shutterstock first introduced the feature through its desktop version, though extending it to smartphones does feel like a natural move, given that smartphones are cameras in their own right. "When we unveiled Reverse Image Search this past spring, we knew that it was a perfect fit for our mobile application -- it's arguably one of the best use cases for computer vision technology, in general," said Shutterstock CEO and founder Jon Oringer.

Terrapattern is a visual search engine that, from the first moment you use it, you wonder: why didn't Google come up with this ten years ago? Click on a feature on the map -- a baseball diamond, a marina, a roundabout -- and it immediately highlights everything its algorithm thinks looks like it. It's remarkably fast, simple to use, and potentially very powerful. Go ahead and give it a try first to see how natural it is to search for something. And how did a handful of digital artists and developers create it -- and for under 35,000?

I built a food logging app that uses deep learning to classify photos. About a month ago I posted an invite for the beta test for this app, but most people couldn't use it due to how restrictive closed beta tests are. I built this using deep learning. The app can recognize over 1000 types of food on your plate, and pull down nutritional information based on the recognized keyword and restaraunt location you may be eating at. All of this is for genetic research.

I write about search A LOT--about how to nail search engine marketing (SEM), the impact mobile has on consumers' search and purchasing habits and how RankBrain and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the search game. Why do I write about this so much? That's easy: if you're a marketer and don't care about what's happening with search, it's impossible to do your job. The conversations about search so far, though, have always had one thing in common: We've been talking about text. Think for a moment about all the images and visual assets circulating the web.

Stock photo giant Shutterstock is boosting its artificial intelligence (AI) credentials today with the launch of a new reverse image search feature within its iOS app. The New York-based company offers more than 80 million images for bloggers and media outlets, but keyword searches aren't always the most effective way to find images relevant to a story. If you want to search for photos that are similar to ones you already have in your possession, or if you want to find alternative photos based on the shapes, mood, color scheme, and general mise en scène around you, reverse image search comes into play. You can search Shutterstock by using the camera on your iPhone or the photos on your camera roll to find similar images. The launch comes three months after Shutterstock first introduced the feature through its desktop version, though extending it to smartphones does feel like a natural move, given that smartphones are cameras in their own right.

Google is going to extra lengths to make sure that you see its shopping links. The internet firm is introducing Shopping ads to image search results -- look for pictures of a nice couch and you may see a link to buy it. Google says this is largely about enabling more on-the-spot purchases, but there's no denying that this is partly about snubbing Amazon. After all, your first instinct may be to search Amazon when you spot that must-have item; you won't have to do that after today.

What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one. The pictures, which veer from beautiful to terrifying, were created by the company's image recognition neural network, which has been "taught" to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photographs. They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them, and so on.

Shutterstock is flexing its AI muscles with the news that the stock photo giant is introducing new computer-vision search smarts to its platform. The company, which is headquartered in New York's Empire State Building, went public back in 2012 and now offers more than 70 million images for bloggers and media outlets -- which can make searching for specific assets challenging. Of course, the trusty old keyword search tool is effective to an extent, but what if you want to find images that are similar to one you have in your possession? Or what if you want alternative images based on color schemes, mood, or shapes? This is where Shutterstock's new reverse image search comes into play.