In the realm of search engines that might be offering a visual way of searching the web for images are www.riya.com and, since their recent (18. aug 2006) acquistion of Neven Vision, www.google.com. While riya seems to have headed into that direction for quite some time, google has woken up to the area of visual searching only recently, but since it is able to flex it's financial muscles, they will probably soon catch up.

Thinking back in time, I am remembering the good old pre-Google days, when there were such innovative search engines as altavista.com (now yahoo/overture). And I even remember that there was an attempt to do visual searching on altavista, probably 7 or 8 years ago. Can anyone confirm ?