OK, so, what’s the 250 machines for?

A better way to find stuff. A way better way.

Just don’t tell Maryam, OK?

Why not?

Well, it’s the first time you can search for “red strappy shoes” and have every type of shoe show up VISUALLY.

This is cool stuff.

It’s called Like.com.

TechCrunch has a report up.

I interviewed Munjal Shah, Riya’s CEO and here’s the interview. Here’s a demo of Like.com. They are both videos published to my ScobleShow video blog.

More shortly.

I hear that Like.com will be turned on shortly. Like.com is up now.

This is a lot of fun.

Some stories about Like.com.

1) The URL cost him $100,000. In the interview he explains how they bought it. It involved finding the guy who owned it, jumping a fence, and leaving a bottle of wine with a note on it (he wouldn’t answer his email).
2) Riya was pretty close to being sold to Google. If it had been, they never would have worked on this search engine. So, by getting turned down by Google Riya came back with a much better business.
3) Just the jewelry set takes 20GB of RAM.
4) Munjal still believes in blogs, but for this launch Riya talked with fashion bloggers, and journalists outside the tech world like at People magazine. Why? Well, this site — in its current incarnation — will be most interesting to women and non-geeks. If you’ve looked at who participates here, it’s heavily male.
5) Why not keep working on face detection? Because they learned through user testing that they’d never be able to make it good enough. They found that by focusing on visual image searches they can get a much more satisfied user base.

What do you think? It is the most interesting search experiences I’ve had since I first laid my eyes on Google about eight years ago.

UPDATE: Liz Gannes of GigaOm has a report too, but isn’t as impressed. “I do think this is a cool idea but it’s not dazzlingly good yet.”

UPDATE 2: Dan Farber has a report too. So does Rafe Needleman over on his new Webware blog.

UPDATE 3: Andre Ribeirinho writes “What I like most about Like is that being a shopping comparison site they are targetting a specific target, Women and pursuing a market worth of $15-$30B.”