Briefs

Riya, the Silicon Valley photo recognition start-up, is expanding its ambition: It wants to become a full-fledged "visual" search engine.

(Currently, Riya allows you to upload a photo, define the photo as matching a particular person and then it tries to scan other photos to figure out if other photos in your collecton match that. Editor)

The move was signaled today by chief executive Munjal Shah, who told us in a phone call that he has radically transformed the company in recent days to go after this new goal. It will take about three months to crawl the entire Web, collect images and then process them to identify their various qualities so that they are searchable, he said.

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