Google-backed researchers Shumeet Baluja (pictured) and Yushi Jing presented the Mountain View company's latest image search and recognition efforts to an audience in Beijing, China on Thursday. VisualRank attempts to do for images what PageRank has done for typical Web pages — rank them in search results according to "authority," which will presumably increase the relevance of results. Problem is, their limited success came at a cost Google is typically loathe to pay: 150 units of homo sapiens who helped sort and rank the images by hand. Munjal Shah, CEO of image-search startup Riya, remarked to the Times: "I think what they're trying to accomplish is largely impossible." Funny, because large-scale, advanced image recognition is what Marissa Mayer says will solve Street View's privacy conundrum.

Through her Demo conference, Chris Shipley strands some of the most important people in tech together in the desert and forces them to pay attention to strange new ideas. It's like Burning Man without the playa dust and with much fancier drinks, or so I'm told. The experience is apparently scarring enough to bond people for life, judging by the palsy-walsy crowd of past Demo participants and guests who crowded into Palo Alto's Zibibbo restaurant Tuesday night to mingle and mix with other "alumni."

Despite a great deal of initial buzz-hype, Munjal Shah's Riya photo recognizer deflated into irrelevance in a matter of months. However, after reapplying the same tech to visual shopping searches, Shah's Like.com has proven a boon for those who must know where Forest Whitaker gets his neckties. Mockery aside, it's a much better use of the software with an obvious revenue hook. Even so, it must be grating to have Riya still stinking up the place, reputation-wise, as in this Business 2.0 article on the benefits of failure. "Just eight months after watching Riya sink like a stone," begins the paragraph introducing Like.com's relative success. Hey, leave Riya alone; according to its website, it's still in beta.