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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Image Search has also been completely ruined by their push for ML based results without even checking if it's better.

Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are never from the film.

They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using the context of the web page would give a better answer.

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Luckily, there's an alternative: images.yandex.com

It effortlessly does both reverse image search AND image objects search. Results are usually so good, it almost seems like Google decided to cripple their image search on purpose.

The fact that Yandex includes the OCR'd text in any image you search from is awesome.

I use yandex images so often that it triggers their bot filter. I think they 've found themselves a high-potential niche here.

If there's one party I'd be even less comfortable sharing my data with than Google, it would be a Russian company. Not because I think Russians are evil or anything, but rather because there's even less accountability and oversight (if any at all) with what they do with that data than we have in the US/Europe.

That's specifically reverse image search, I find that image search itself has gotten much better at generic search terms.

I agree that the generic results on reverse search are annoying, but my guess is that it isn't replacing exact results, but rather giving you something when there would've been no results at all. If you search for an exact frame that does exist, it usually finds it correctly.

much better at serving pinterest pages and stock image sites ... maybe

Google Search for DIY project images: Get 90% Pinterest results that end up just linking to a random machine generated page with garbage text and a few tangentially related pictures.

Google Search for someones Instagram handle: Get one Instagram result and endless pages of sites that scrape Instagram and have the person's profile interspersed with ads.

Try Bing's image search. It's actually very good. Bigger previews, ability to easily download, smart ML-driven similarity search (you can even draw a rectangle of an image to find something similar to that area), better at suggesting related images, nicer UI overall. The mobile app is also much nicer than Google's when it comes to images.

I switched over to Bing a couple months ago because Google's image search now shows very tiny previews on the right side of the screen. They're often barely bigger than the image I click on. Been using Google since 1999, but I guess I look at images enough it pushed me over.

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