FindMyLookAlike

We wanted to address a recent comment made on Joe Loong’s blog about our product. He discussed how AOL’s CTO, Balan Nair, recently talked about the Celebrity Look-Alike product at AOL’s Developer Day and showed that both he and another executive, Barry Appelman, matched William Hung. Since neither of them remotely look like William Hung, Joe concluded that the algorithm must have a “William Hung bias”.

We would like to clarify that the “matches” that Balan showed for Barry and himself were actually “doctored” in order to get laughs. That is, Balan thought it would be funny for both of them to match to William Hung, and as such, the slides were modified to reflect this. In reality, the product does not produce William Hung matches for either of them. The real results are illustrated in the pictures below.

Joe also mentioned that he generated a William Hung match as well (see picture below). As we mention on our site, we currently have about 500 celebrities, about equally split among the genders. Because of previous legal issues with using celebrity photos, we were limited to using only this small number of images, and as such, unfortunately, we have very few celebrities who are not Caucasians or African-Americans in our database (we actually only have 2 Asian males in our database, including William Hung, and only 1 Indian Asian male). Fortunately, due to recent legal rulings, we will now be able to use thousands of celebrities (including many more for the different ethnicities). We plan to add at least another thousand celebrities to our site within the next week or two.

We are also continuing to look into improving our algorithm as well. As such, we encourage you to continue to check out the site to see to which new celebrities you match! And hopefully, even if you don't get the best matches, at least it will make you laugh!

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• #1 Comment from yeti95060 
  6/15/07 5:39 PM | Permalink

  I thought a good match for Barry would be Woody Allen