TinEye is a
reverse image search engine developed and offered by Idée, Inc., a company based in
Toronto, Canada. Claiming to be "the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks," TinEye allows users to search not using keywords but with images. Upon submitting an image, TinEye creates a "unique and compact digital signature or fingerprint" of the image and matches it with other indexed images. This procedure is able to match even heavily edited versions of the submitted image, but will not usually return similar images in the results.