Google Image Search Tools not staying active with new searches

This is actually a problem with all SaaS apps. You subscribed and bet on some SaaS, but after a year of usage, being dependent on them, they decided to fuck up the UI? There ain't anything you can do about it. There is no "old version" you can download. You are fucked.

Not a single SaaS out there has an older version you can switch to. Don't like the new Stripe UI? Good luck. They do version their API though which is the core of their offerings. But what about Office 365? Notion? RIP.

There was a time, where you could specify image dinensions in a more granular fashion (even with the option of "Larger than: ", where a dimension was supplied). Sadly it is no longer a feature. Granular control on search is long gone.

A lot of times I feel DDG is what Google search felt like in mid-2000s

The real issue here is they changed the behavior and have no way to restore it. I personally do not like when I lose filtering by changing search terms, but every time it happens—unless I’m using something very specialized cough GitHub—I think “what would I expect, or more importantly what would my non-tech family expect?” Often enough, I come up 50/50 depending on usage. Usually my reconsideration favors resetting filters, because most people are not adept at refining search terms in a general context. But both are perfectly reasonable defaults. The issue is that you can’t reclaim your muscle memory once it’s been taken away.

Am I the only one to see the absurdity of the situation where the Russian equivalent is so much more precise and powerful than the American original maintained by one of the most powerful companies in the world? Personally I don't even bother with Google images, for any meaningful searches I head to Yandex. Especially for reverse search: I'm not interested in seeing how Google's AI classifies the image (thank you, I can still do it myself), but finding other copies of the same image, e.g. to check for plagiarism. It's been broken for several years already.

The most astonishing thing for me is what Google Images still doesn't have a slightest idea what to do if you give URL as a parameter, even when there is no results.

I need to click the camera icon and paste URL there.

Even after so many years the mobile UI for Google damage search still doesn't have a button for reverse image search. It should only take a few days to make so I don't know why it's still not there.

But it just makes you ask why. Without at least some way to "upgrade" back to the original functionality, what was the point? Were the COGS that bad?

If the right people see this someone will reply with a GIS chrome (or firefox) plugin (that they just made) that fixes the selections to the last ones used.

Bing behaves in the same way, although I think it has always been like that.