An idea for an interface for picture search

A few weeks ago I was a beer festival in Munich, and I was talking to
someone who was working on something, hey it was a beer festival, but then I
had an idea about the type of interface that might be really useful for
doing search. We now search for images using text, so somewhere someone has
to build the text to image representation of the images in their database.
Arguably this is one area where tagging has made an enormous improvement,
ala flickr, but it seems to me that if you could make an interface that
would allow a user to either draw or assemble a rough draft of the image
they were searching for then this might offer a powerful and complimentary
approach. I envisage a system where people would be able to brig together a
collage of elements, a car template that could be sized, coloured, a generic
person or child object. By arranging these elements on the search interface
the seeker could give a lot more information in their search, vis a vis the
spatial arrangement of elements.

Well this I heard that there are some people already working on this, I
guess that's not surprising, I hope that they can make it work, because it
would be really cool.

tags: search, image, tech