Google Acquires Like.com

Mashable reports that "Google has acquired visual search and price comparison engine Like.com, according to an open letter posted on Like.com’s website."

“Since 2006, Like.com has been moving the frontiers of eCommerce forward one step at a time,” Munjal Shah, the company’s CEO, told Mashable. “We were the first to bring visual search to shopping, the first to build an automated cross-matching system for clothing, and more. We didn’t stop there, and we don’t have plans to stop now. We see joining Google as a way to supersize our vision and supercharge our passion.”

Mashable continues: "Like.com launched in 2006 from the remains of Riya, a facial recognition search engine. While that company is now gone, Shah used the technology behind it to build Like.com’s visual shopping comparison engine.

Google has been experimenting with visual search and image recognition. In 2009, it launched Similar Images, a tool using image recognition technology to filter image results by similarity. Although it overhauled Image Search last month, the Like.com acquisition signals the company's intention to do more with image recognition.

Google paid around $100 million for the visual shopping engine, according to TechCrunch.