Like.com has to be the beginnings of the perfect tool for the Veruca Salt of shoppers. I had to do some research this morning using defacto standard search and I found "about 344,000" results returned. While these results would be great if I could get some click monkeys to take some time to look at actual search results, it is not the case.
Like helps narrow down the search for someone with aesthetics in mind first, then features. Months ago I uploaded my photo collection into Like's parent company's, Riya.com, facial recognition photosharing site. The results were impressive for an AI (and equal to asking my 2 year old niece to sort my photos).
This time around in my nonscientific test, the image recognition has improved to help shoppers, but not to the level of helpfulness as the attractive sales lady at Nordstrom. This is Like's initial target audience (jewelry, handbags, shoes and watches....not me!)
Like has done some things here that I have yet to see matched anywhere on the web, such as being able to hone in on specific attributes of a picture and find other similar items. This is how to bring shopping to more visual, less tech savvy people. This is the first shopping search engine I can see my mom using (she agreed to the first "bondi blue" iMac because it matched the wallpaper).
While a tag cloud may make perfect sense to the Web 2.0 crowd, it's meaningless to the masses and it really seems like a stopgap for true visual search. Like.com did seem a bit sluggish on my midrange computer but it is definitely usable and I would recommend it to all compulsive shoppers. Watch these guys closely, I think they'll be making more splashes in the search pool but it may only be a matter of time before the G makes a similar feature.
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