eBay's new high-end furniture shop, eBay Collective, includes a visual search engine

Ebay this morning launched a new site, dedicated to shopping for furniture and other items for the home. Called eBay Collective, the site also takes advantage of technology from the company's recently announced acquisition of visual search engine Corrigon, which it bought for under 30 million. On eBay Collective, the technology has been integrated to power a "Shop the Room" feature which lets online shoppers hover over an image of a fully designed space, and then the tool will search across eBay inventory to surface items that are close matches to that portion of the image. Corrigon, which had been around since 2008, had developed a way to search and identify objects within an image, then match that with other images or links to products. In a larger photo, you can hover over a specific portion of the image and Corrigon's tech can see the object in that section, then match it with others.