I’ve often wondered what kind of toys we would start seeing once big corporations found out free tools can dramatically increase website traffic. It looks like I don’t have to dream any longer.

Here is an excellent example — a family tree site, MyHeritage.com, has a free face recognition tool. I don’t know how much this cost them, but I’d venture to say it wasn’t cheap. This is certainly a lot more than a lone webmaster programmer could create.

SEOs have been giving away tools for some time now. Shawn Hogan, the founder of digitalpoint, has learned first hand just how powerful of this strategy can be. Within hardly a year of publishing a few free SEO tools he has brought in traffic that resulted in the largest free advertising network and one of the biggest webmaster forums on the internet.

At MyHeritage you can upload photos of people and run them up against a database to see who is the closest celebrity they look like. I said screw that and tried uploading photos of actual celebrities to see if it could correctly recognize them. Despite some failures, this definately works! As you can see in the screenshot below, I uploaded a picture of actress Natalie Portman, and it returned a positive result. (It didn’t do so well with Michael Jackson which it recognized as Michelle Pfieffer.)

There is little doubt that this tool will create a lot of traffic to MyHeritage.com. The question is, will the traffic be targetted enough to be profitable? I’m sure MyHeritage is measuring this very closely.