Welcome to Web2.0 Watch, our brand new section where Chetan Asher, Chief Executive Officer of Tonic Media profiles some of the hottest emerging web properties that are reinventing web experience.  His criteria for picking these properties is simple, they have innovative concepts, are focused on enhancing the user experience and are truly harnessing the power of Internet.

Kicking off the series by profiling the visual shopping search engine – Like.com

How many times have you spent long frustrating hours looking for a particular pattern of shirt or a particular shape of bag in a different color? Surely quite often, looking for a particular product can be very frustrating. Here’s where Like.com comes to your rescue.

You can search for a particular product by typing your requirement for e.g.’ Lime green chequered shirt’ or simply upload a photo of a similar product using their ‘Likethis’ feature and voila! Like.com will find products similar to your photo or description from over 200 shopping sites.

That’s not all, if you like a particular aspect from your search results, you can simply highlight that particular element and the visual search engine will further refine products from your search that match your highlighted criteria.

What makes this so interesting, is that now one can simply take a photo of an old sneaker, upload it and find exactly similar products in just a few minutes. No more lounging around from shop to shop, no sweat if the local stores don’t store it anymore.

Just use the phone camera, take a photo, upload and refine your criteria and you have deals from several online retailers on products of your choice. You could also upload a picture of particular movie star wearing your favourite sunglasses and search for a similar product.

In a nutshell, you can search for products based on a particular visual, color, pattern, detail and even material.

Like.com offers search for apparels, bags, watches, jewellery, accessories, cosmetics, fragrances and even rugs and posters.

Like.com is founded by a company called Riya, which is focussed on visual computing.