App Tracks Down Pets That Match Your Old One

A new app could help you get over Rover—with a lookalike replacement for the pooch who's passed on. You upload a picture of your pet, and PetMatch uses visual recognition technology to find a matching one that's available for adoption, TechCrunch reports. It's a product from Superfish, a company focused on making computers "see" better. PetMatch analyzes aspects of your photo like the distance between your pet's eyes and its facial shape.

Your photo is compared to data from another service, PetFinder, which shows pets up for adoption around the country—and PetMatch highlights the ones that are nearby. "Our sophisticated algorithms … allow us to analyze every picture and provide similar and near identical images in real time—no text tags, no human involvement," Superfish says, per CNET. (Though media reports are portraying PetMatch as a sort of pet-replacing service, a YouTube ad suggests users might use it to track down pets that look like that cute dalmatian spotted in the park.)