"It is the most interesting search experiences I've had since I first laid my eyes on Google about eight years ago."

--Robert Scoble, commenting on Riya's new Like.com, a photo-driven similarity search product created by Munjal Shah and team.

Susan sez: If I was a VC, I would have given tons of money to Riya--these are some of the smartest and most resilent people I have met in SV start up land. It is going to be fascinating to see if this shopping focused incarnation of their search algo catches on as the holiday shopping season ratchets up. Either way, I am sure there will be more instances of deployment of this very cool logic to drive visual shopping and more.

Longtime Riya friend Mike Arrington has the breaking news, tons more comments in the blogosphere. Nifty multimedia press release here.

And yes, this new product--and the parent company--are totally worth checking out in detail.