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aceperry

Very cool idea. It doesn't look too much like Snowden though.

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Google image search agrees with you: http://bit.ly/1CdboIs

note: jack from "the shining" shows up

Google image search is not a face recognition engine or even a way to find different pictures of the same object.

What it does is look for different versions (sizes and croppings) of the exact same picture, and if that fails, look for images with similar colors (Jack from the Shining).

It's actually pretty effective at face recognition when given actual faces:

Obama: http://bit.ly/19Zkgur

Putin: http://bit.ly/1aDAvyA

Lindsay Lohan: http://bit.ly/19ZkFgk

Matt Damon: http://bit.ly/1xYl5il

That only works because it found exact versions of that same picture on different websites and looked at the text of those sites and saw that the name "Barack Obama" was in the text of all those sites so it did an image search for "Barack Obama". Like I said: it searches for exact picture matches.

If you took your own picture of Obama that had never been posted online before and did a reverse image search, it wouldn't work.

Obviously it works better if it can find the exact image, but I don't think that's all that it's doing. For example, here's a picture of the Golden Gate bridge that I took myself from Angel Island, never before uploaded to the Internet:

http://bit.ly/1HJy0oL

It couldn't get the query, but it does get similar images, including at least one other that's also of the Golden Gate bridge. I unfortunately don't have any personal pictures of celebrities, but here's one of a slightly-askew photo of my computer screen that includes Obama's face (but deliberately not all of the original picture):

http://bit.ly/1CNk9wa

It managed to guess that one correctly, even though it didn't have the exact original image.

For the Obama one toward the bottom of the page there is the section "Pages that include matching images", so it did find the exact original image. I knew it would match even cropped images, but apparently it can also handle slight rotation and some color changes.

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