From Numbers to Names

What do the search results mean?

The uploaded face is compared against faces from our current data set. The top 10 most similar faces are shown. Note this is a “best effort” search. If a face without any close resemblances is uploaded, the results could be poor - there is no minimum face similarity threshold. Search results should improve over time as more images are added to the data set. Please subscribe to find out when the data has changed.

I found a potential match - what should I do next?

Please click on the “context” image to investigate further.

How does gender affect the results? Why is an image of a man matching an image of a woman?

There is nothing about gender specifically taken into account - in fact, the model has reliably discovered siblings of different genders. You can think of the search results as being “the closest matches (and possibly relatives), regardless of gender”. We’re constantly working to improve our model, but we’ve just gotten started.

I got very bad search results that make no sense. Why?

Please see the above on “What do the search results mean?” If you do believe that the search results should’ve included a particular image, and that you may have encountered a bug, please let us know, and we’ll try to resolve it.

What happens when I upload a photo containing multiple faces?

If you've created an account, a search will be run for each face in the photo.

In the limited “sample search” (reachable from the home page), one face will be chosen, but it might not be the one you wanted to use in your search. If you want to control which face is used, please crop the image so that only one face appears in it -- but please note: don’t crop too closely to the person’s face, or it might appear as a “partial face” query (which we don’t support).