TinEye is a reverse image search engine developed and offered by Idée, Inc., a company based in Toronto, Canada, which was founded by Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore in 1999. The use of the Web application is free of charge for customers. According to the company, TinEye is the first web-based image search engine to use image identification technology. Currently, the technology is an Open beta release. Idée launched the service on May 6, 2008. Intended use of TinEye is different from traditional image search engines in that intended users are owners of copyrighted images who are looking to see if their imagery is being used online without authorization, as well as brand marketers who are tracking where their brands are showing up on the web.
...
As of February 2011, TinEye claims to have indexed about 1.86 billion images for comparisons. However, this is a very small proportion of the total number of images available on the World Wide Web.
