Today we released some new features to the Polar Rose website and plugin – detection of duplicate images, statistics and a new functionality in the plugin to make it easier to notify us about bugs.

Duplicates

Duplicate detection means that multiple versions of the same image are grouped together – making it easier for you to get an overview of results for a particular person.

Simply click the link shown above an image that has duplicates and you will open a page showing all the duplicates – even if some images have been cropped, scaled or had other modifications made to them they will still be shown on this page.

When you browse the page of duplicates of an image you can also see all the different websites that the image has be found at.

Statistics

Under the search field on the Polar Rose home page there are now links to pages that show the most popular searches, most named people and the top users on Polar Rose.

Flag as bug

The Polar Rose plugin now includes a checkbox which allows you to quickly and easily flag bugs (roses that appear on things other than faces). Doing this helps us to improve our face recognition and show better results when you search on the Polar Rose website.

We will never rest till our good is better and our better best!

We have just released an update to our plugin user interface with several performance improvements. We still believe we can be faster. We love speed so please stay tuned!

We’ll be experiencing some smaller outages to both the Polar Rose website and plugin over the next three days as we do some upgrades. Thanks for your patience.

Update: First stage is done. We have a new plugin out for all beta-users. Tell your Firefox to search for updates or restart your IE to get it. Hope you like it! More to come in the next few days…

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!

As most of the active beta testers will have discovered by now through the Firefox auto-update service, we released a major upgrade of the plugin on Monday evening, taking us to version 0.50.

A few visible highlights of the release:

• Stability! As those of you who have used the plugin know – and as originally reported – the plugin has had a longstanding issue of often losing connection and stopping to show roses. This has been solved and I’m happy to see the web sprinkled with roses again.


• Several core performance enhancements, including a much faster rendering of roses on photos.


• New status and error messages for better debugging.


• Improved auto-complete of names (which will get better yet soon)

The new plugin is basically a full rewrite and for those of you who are interested in the underlying solution, we have started rendering the drop-down naming window as an iframe served from polarrose.com. This allows much greater flexibility with regards to adding new features to the plugin by simply changing the corresponding pages server-side.

(For a more in-depth overview read the separate post by my colleague Stefan Arentz.)

Next up will be the Internet Explorer plugin, the first matching using the data that has been accumulated by our beta users, and finally our APIs – two of the three will be coming in time for Christmas.

Please report any issues through the feedback page or feel free to comment directly on this post.

Finally, thanks to Mo Jo for leading this rewrite and the rest of the crew in Warsaw, Amsterdam and Malmö for making this happen.

PS. We’ll be adding more beta users as soon as the new plugin has proven itself in the wild over the next days.