How do these two seemingly unrelated themes come together? Through Conde Nast Traveler's "Where Are You" content.

I am a long-time subscriber of Conde Nast Traveler, one of the two (along with Travel+Leisure) top-class travel magazines. In every issue, Traveler publishes a nice photo and asks for the readers to guess where the photo is taken. Up to now, I was able to guess that right only a handful of occasions. With TinEye, almost one of my favorite web destinations, the contest is losing its challenge.

TinEye is a brilliant reverse search engine. Upload a picture and you find out other copies of that picture on the web. Lately, I had a great photo on my computer that I really wanted to use as an idea for my upcoming wedding. The problem was, I didn't know where the photo was taken. I used TinEye to find the photo on the web, and one of the results gave me the resort that originally applied the idea and took the photo. After contacting the hotel and learning some key details, my organization firm is now able to build the same idea for my wedding…

Back to Conde Nast Traveler. The "Where Are You" contest is accessible here. You will find that two contests are active for submission. You upload the picture in TinEye, and you get the information about where that photo is taken. I easily found out the location of both pictures of the contest. To make it adventurous for you, I will not reveal the locations myself.

TinEye's library is just a sliver of the online-accessible photos: around 1.4 billion images. So, as of today, it is not a magic ball. As they expand the search index and build a similarity-based search engine, it will be one of the killer products out there. Especially when the similarity engine hits the web, consider lots of disruptions. At that moment, you should think twice to use Chatroulette. All your counterparty needs to do will be take a screenshot and search it. Probably, it will hit a picture of you in Flickr or Facebook….