Over the next week we’ll invite the rest of you who signed up for the beta. It feels truly wonderful!

Inviting the rest of our signed up beta testers is one of the final procedures ramping up to our public beta, something we and those who’ve followed us have been looking forward to for some time now. We’ve come a long way.

So far 2000 registered beta testers have found over 21 million images, featuring over 8 million people and named nearly 150.000 of them. Thats not bad, and I’m curious to see how this scales as we add more users.

For me Polar Rose has become a cockpit for my visual web. I find 40 images of me being “seen with” a selection of people (click the stacks to see who). My friends and family are also now searchable – most of them were not before, I think this makes sense.

In the short tail I find several hundred links to Barack Obama and while that might not bring much value compared to any other search service, knowing who he’s seen with on various occasions definitely does. Its a whole new way of navigating the web and I like it.

No need to worry if you do not get any results by searching for your own name. Using the plugin and the coming widget for partner sites you and those who know you can add you to the index as we go live.

Stay tuned. Public beta coming up.

Today we release a new site with a cleaner simpler look & feel. The main focus of this release is improved search functionality including clustered search results (stacks as we like to call them) based on facial similarity.

The Polar Rose plugin is now available for Internet Explorer (version 7) so please try it out and report any bugs that you find! We also made some modifications to the plugin user interface to bring it in line with the new site look.

User interface improvements…

The main goal of the user interface re-design was to make searching and browsing results easier and more intuitive. We also wanted to simplify the other interaction points (forms, settings etc.) and the plugin user interface. Finally we wanted to create a user interface which is easier to expand upon and add new functionality to.

Look out for an upcoming post with more about the future user interface developments we are working on.

Under the hood…

We have built a new flexible and scalable infrastructure to support increased numbers of users – more beta invites will be sent out soon! We also now utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to make the output of search queries faster.

In closing…

Todays release represents a lot of hard work by the whole team at Polar Rose and we all look forward to your feedback and comments. We are already busy designing and developing many improvements and new features which we will be releasing over the coming weeks and months!

We are making some major updates and changes to the Polar Rose site and browser plugin today (yeah – we know that its about time!) and because of this our services will be unavailable from UTC 09:00 today. If all goes according to plan the site and plugin will be available again by the end of the day.

We are making some updates and changes to our main database and our services will be unavailable from UTC 10:00 on Monday the 5th of May. The downtime is expected to be 60–90 minutes and will affect both the polarrose.com site and the browser plugin.

During the last couple of weeks we have been working on upgrading our hardware. In the final stage of this upgrade we need to move some servers. As a result, our services will be down for up to 4 hours on March 26 starting at 08:00 UTC.