Scavenger hunts just got significantly more tactical with Descartes Labs' new GeoVisual Search. Finding shipping containers, runways and even parking lots on a global scale is no problem with the free tool made available today. Descartes Labs is a geospatial analytics startup based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The company specializes in analyzing satellite imagery and other global data with machine learning to power predictive analytics for agriculture and other key industries. Users can scour the earth's surface by placing a provided bounding box around any object they would like to search for.

At this moment in history, there are more satellites photographing Earth from orbit than just about anyone knows what to do with. Planet, Inc., has more than 150 orbiting cameras, each the size of a shoebox. And more startups are planning to launch their own. What should we do with all that imagery? How can we search it and process it?

Searching the planet just got a whole lot easier. Global forecasting company Descartes Labs released a demo search engine that allows users to scan the entire globe to find specific types of objects. Want to know the location of every oil derrick on earth? "Click anywhere on the map and we'll scan the US, China, or the entire globe to find things that look similar," the company's announced reads. "Click on a baseball diamond, a wind turbine, or even a house with a moat and GeoVisual Search will find thousands of other matching objects." Due to the varying resolution of satellite imagery in the company's data, searches within the U.S. are the most detailed, with China and the globe as a whole less so.