It seems that some people easily assume that Google products are the best in their categories. Here is a counter-example:<p>Yandex Image Search is much better at finding matches for an image that has been modified (by Photoshop or by adding extra stuff on top). It has helped me find the source of many memes.<p>Give it a try:
https://yandex.com/images/<p>Here are some images that you can try:
https://img.youtube.com/vi/7g-EFLEkRpQ/maxresdefault.jpg
https://img.youtube.com/vi/v4U2JrmVfdI/maxresdefault.jpg
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VZngU4a23ik/maxresdefault.jpg<p>Often, only Yandex enables you to find the original images that were use to create these thumbnails. While Google just gives you the links to the thumbnails.
Google Image Search used to be perfect, around 2-4 years ago or so they swapped out the old school system which seemed to take some sort of fingerprint of the image and then tell what it was from the context of pages the image was found on.<p>The current system seems to use machine learning to try and tell what the content of the image image is then just provide generic results for that term along with a similar color palette.<p>Used to be able to find a movie screenshot on Tumblr, image search it and the name of the movie would come up. These days it'll go recognize the image is a woman on a street using ML, then show you results for "Woman" or "street" in the color palette of the image and if you're lucky you'll get a link to Pintrest too which also doesn't contain the context and just pushes you into a Pintrest onboarding flow.<p>Feels like the Image Search team is more preoccupied with solving problems which are interesting to them with zero interest if the tool actually better or not for people who use it every day.
Yandex image search also uses facial recognition, which other image search engines have deliberately avoided.<p>As a result it's getting a lot of interest as a tool for investigative journalism. This tutorial by Bellingcat is really interesting: <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using-reverse-image-search-for-investigations/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...</a>
Google image search seemingly has become more about identifying your image and then searching for different images of the same thing. It’s really not a useful tool for identifying a particular image any more.<p>Yandex is my go to now.
Does Yandex have an api open to the public for image search? I’m working on a side project of an image recognition app that can recognize an image of a specific image a user uploads, search the web, and return the results. Exactly as shazaam works but in my case for images. Unsure if Yandex will be useful in this case. I looked into Google’s VisionAI image recognition platform but it seems that platform can only recognize what the object is (such as a shoe or cat) rather than giving me results of exact or similar images. If anyone here could point me in the right direction Id appreciate it.
it also finds the image you are actually looking for, instead of the pinterest-of-a-free-but-not-free-stock-photo-spammer<p>it also shows the image full width, not in a frustrating slightly-bigger-than-thumbnail preview on a side pane<p>it also actually searches face images, not just tomatoes<p>also a lot less a prude than google
I was surprised when I discovered that Yandex's OCR is also better than Google's version:<p><a href="https://translate.yandex.com/ocr" rel="nofollow">https://translate.yandex.com/ocr</a><p>For example, comparing the results from pictures with Japanese or Chinese text, Yandex gives meaningful results, while Google often struggles.
Fascinating. I don't know if other people will get the same result but reverse image searching for [1] on Yandex gave literal CRTs in literal swamps, not just things in water or CRTs somewhere. Doing the same on Google gave neither CRTs nor swamps.<p>Regular image search is much nicer too but I wonder if that's just because it isn't polluted with products? Searching for galaxy on Google gave me all kinds of products while on Yandex is just gave me literal galaxies. Maybe just less spam because its less popular? Or maybe some of those Google results are actually ads?<p>1. <a href="https://im0-tub-com.yandex.net/i?id=a8f55cb11e37e5a6616b33bd48d9cbda&n=13&exp=1" rel="nofollow">https://im0-tub-com.yandex.net/i?id=a8f55cb11e37e5a6616b33bd...</a>
Yandex image search is amazingly good, certainly for faces. Bing is also pretty good. Google is the worst out of these three.<p>If a picture of your face is hosted on the internet (for example on your blog) you can do the following experiment. Take a selfie (eg. a picture of your face that doesn't exist yet online) and upload it to Yandex. It will probably identify you.
Another good example of this is this photoshoped image. Yandex give you both results, the background and the girl in the foreground.<p>NSFW-ish (girl in bikini)
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/k8Ovoap" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/k8Ovoap</a>
Some other handy tools:<p>- For finding the source of artworks, especially the anime/manga variety: saucenao.com<p>- For figuring out which anime a given screenshot is from: saucenao.com, trace.moe<p>- For a right-click shortcut for searching various image search engines: <a href="https://saucenao.com/tools/" rel="nofollow">https://saucenao.com/tools/</a>
I don't like that the "view full size image" is gone, or at least almost gone. I remember Google Images being very good in the early 2000's, but now it's really anti-user. It has become a chore to save images from Google, with a lot being Pinterest spam that doesn't fulfill my search.
Yandex free services are underrated in general. I use them as a free email provider for all my programming related mailing lists and bugzilla accounts and I have had zero issues whatsoever.
I'm seeing decent results for both, then I tried Garbage: Yandex shows some random band I've never seen before, google shows garbage bins and landfills.