'Chinese Google' Unveils Visual Search Engine Powered by Fake Brains

Chinese search giant Baidu has served up its first ever visual search engine, which allows users to finally query the web using only images as input instead of keywords. Google has long offered this sort of thing, but Baidu continues to show that it's determined to keep pace with Larry Page and company. "We didn't have any similar kind of product in China because we didn't have the sufficient technology to handle this," says Baidu's Kai Yu, who led the project. "In the China market, this is the first of its kind." Unveiled last week, the tool grew out of Baidu's newly launched Institute of Deep Learning, the company's Beijing- and Silicon Valley-based research arm focused on deep learning, a field of computer science that seeks to mimic how the human brain works. The company has already deployed deep-learning algorithms for optical character, face, and voice recognition, online advertising and web search.