As many of you are aware Getty images have sophisticated software for finding their photos online. So my question is... Does any similar software exist for typefaces? Can any program be ran to find the shape of a glyph across the internet?
Typophile
Font Tracking Software
You can much more easily crawl the Internet and detect webfont usage on sites, no?
hhp
It is possible to design a search engine that looks for the mathematical fingerprint of a font. At least with OTF (PostScript or TrueType flavor) this could work. There are descriptions of the vectors and mapping available, which would increase chances of similarity. It wouldn’t be too costly to program such a search engine. The question is more, is it worth the effort? Because it’s a niche use case product. It would require you to have the original font to begin with, so what would be the actual application for general use?
BTW: http://www.typesnitch.com/
hhp
Captured from web.archive.org on 4 Aug 2014. view this capture
Anything is possible, but finding the shape of a glyph on the internet? Highly unlikely considering the cost to do such a thing.