I wonder if that's a function of their technology or their database. Google's image search used to be good, but regulations have forced them to cripple it in some ways, and they might have chosen not to surface results in some contexts.
I don't seem to recall any big story about regulation at the time. It seemed that they carelessly had their internal facial recognition tools (probably also used in Picasa, etc. grouping by person) run on all public content, and the results were feed into public image search. Then people started to notice that Google knows about ALL of their photos posted on the Web, and that probably negatively affected their opinion on the prospects of sharing all their photos and personal data with corporations.
Also, such data collection abilities are generally limited to governments, so it was clear that many of them (US first and foremost) would ask for exclusion of certain individuals, and so forth, and so on, so the public tools were crippled.
Yandex image search does have some facial recognition, but it also seems bit-starved and/or mixed with text search (there's a bigger chance to match if the name and surname is present).
Also, Google is pretty Victorian about porn these days. It's almost like it has a whitelist of “acceptable” porn sites to suit the tastes of potentially angry old ladies.
Not only regulations, Chrome's builtin image search uses Google Lens to find products to sell you instead of simple reverse searches. It has become useless.
Agreed. You can currently do two-step process to get to the old useful search by clicking "Find image source" in the side-bar Lens results, but it's inconvenient enough that I barely use it any more.
In some browsers/profiles I use a "Search by Image" extension that still works properly.
When Chrome first made Lens the built-in image search, there was a way to turn it off. Does anyone know if that's still possible by some more-hidden method?
Agreed, nobody's life improved after they switched to that. There's stll a "Find image source" button above the picture in Google Lens that more or less does what you want
It's not regulation. Google just has chosen to cripple it, the same way Twitter and Facebook mostly chose to censor certain viewpoints. All of these groups thing they are doing good.
That's part of the reason but it's likely also due to what user ogurechny explained. Most consumers have no idea about the true capabilities of their databases and it would scare them if they understood. Take facial recognition as an example. Also a non-crippled reverse image search would be the perfect stalking tool. Simply a lot of ways they could bring lawsuits and regulation on themselves so they tone it down just enough to not lose their search engine hegemony.
I never realized that reverse image search was so bad because of regulations. Can you give me some more context about which regulations affect google reverse image search and why?
