eBay Announces New Drag & Drop Image Search Feature

eBay has announced a new feature in its mobile app that lets you drag and drop images into the search bar to find more items that similar.

Let’s say you’re looking for a new chair, so you type “egg chair” into the eBay search bar and you see a list of results for your search. If one chair in particular stands out, now you can search for more products that look like it—just drag and drop the image of the chair you like into the search bar to see visually similar results.

The site says the visual shopping feature is powered by artificial intelligence.

We use deep learning networks known as convolutional neural networks to process your images. Behind the scenes, when you submit your image in the search field, the neural network converts your image into a vector representation. Then, the vector representation of the image that you submit is compared against more than 1.1 billion live listings in eBay’s marketplace, using nearest neighbor search. Finally, we surface the best-matched items, ranked by visual similarity.

The visual shopping feature will be available starting in August on Android and iOS for the U.S., U.K., Germany and Australia. You can download the eBay app from the App Store for free.

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