Face recognition service (Myheritage)

A few weeks back there was a lot of hype around RIYA being acquired by google and how it could bring back Google into the online photo storage game after losing out to Yahoo's Flickr. Riya is in a closed beta and from what one can gather , it is using facial recognition to automatically tag photos and help users quickly search for photos of friends/family members. Similar to Riya, there is another service called "my heritage" which claims

MyHeritage.com is one of the world's first applications to apply the scientifically advanced technologies of face detection and recognition to family history and to consumer photos; and it's free.

So all one has to do is upload some photo to myHeritage and it will compare the photograph with the internal celebrity photos and come up with the closest match. Does it work ? It is far from perfect and presents some really hilarious results. Check out one of the comparisons below .

It depends very highly on the angle at which the photo is taken and a matching photo in the database. So for some of the snaps of actors like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt etc, I was able to get a perfect match, since they had either the same or identical snap in their database. But I am not sure how effective this would be in case of group photos etc and what pratical use such a service can provide. Besides who will run a facial check on the photographs of celebrities ?

Finally I went on an ego trip and searched my photos for celebrity matches, with hysterical results.