After rampant speculation that Google was in talks to buy Riya, a cool new Flickr-like service that can learn to recognize faces, the CEO, Munjal Shah, finally chimed in today to put those rumors to bed.

So Google will not buy Riya for now. But, in the same post, Shah also said “Riya is more than photo search. Our goal is to help you find every photo of yourself on the web.” Perhaps they did a deal with the Great Search Engine anyway?

I hope so.

Auto-tagging of photos on the web would definitely be a very cool feature for Google and access to Google’s great database of photos on the web would make Riya much more useful too.

Anyway Riya is going to DEMO in February, so I expect we will find out then.