7 ms·

New search-by-image method on Bing.com

131 points by rhema 8y ago

sebazzz 8y ago
Nice, though I use Bing daily (I am the only one, if I believe my collegues), I didn't know this exist. I do wonder however, why the search function doesn't try searching on sub-parts of the image automatically. Bing really has been improving compared to Google. I can find stuff on Bing which I can't easily find on Google because Google keeps rebuilding my search query, causing irrelevant results to show up.
- rustcharm 8y ago
  Bing is my primary search engine. This feature has been in Bing for at least 6 months. I love it.
- jccalhoun 8y ago
  I use bing as my main search engine mainly for the rewards. I've gotten quite a few $5 amazon gift cards that way over the years. However, it frequently doesn't return the results I need so I often go over to google.
  - mcny 8y ago
    Does it make you verify you're a human using a real phone number? I'm trying to go 100% sim free (Google Voice, Signal, WhatsApp) but Bing doesn't recognize VoIP numbers like Google Voice.
- chii 8y ago
  > I do wonder however, why the search function doesn't try searching on sub-parts of the image automatically. i also wonder the same. But then it's quite a hard problem to automatically decide which part of the subimage to rerun a search (presumably, it's not free to run so many).
  - nour_js 8y ago
    Actually this is a typical Machine Learning probleme, luckily was solved years ago and you can read about it here: https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-3-deep-learning-and-convolutional-neural-networks-f40359318721 https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-3-...
    - archgoon 8y ago
      I don't think that is directly applicable to this case (definitely not to the level of calling the problem 'solved'). The link describes a technique for training a neural net to detect a type of image, an '8' for example, in an image regardless of location. However, in this case, you only have one sample of the target. You could run a net to attempt to extract a list of features (children, bronze), and compare that to all your images, but I don't think that's how the bing image search is structured. That would be closer to searching for '4 children bronze park' (which it does a great job of finding such things; just nothing related to the target image). Also, when you use convolution in the way described in the article, you would lose relative position information (or at least, dampen that part of the signal) of each of the bronze statues; as the entire point is to not care about the position of the object.
kibwen 8y ago
Good to see signs that Bing isn't just in maintenance mode, I'd hate to lose what little competition in search engines we have left. I switched back to Google from Yahoo after the latter got sold to Verizon, but it occurs to me that I never really did give Bing a fair shake. I suppose now's as good a time as ever.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I just finished spending two months on DuckDuckGo, and landed back on Google simply because I was tired of searching for so many things twice: once with the original search, and once with g!. I really want a Google alternative. Maybe I'll try Bing again, too.
  - supernovae 8y ago
    I've used bing for over a year now, rarely ever going back to google. I'm in the USA, no reference for outside the US...
  - nacs 8y ago
    Try Startpage. It proxies Google search results -- basically Google without the tracking.
    - brentadamson 8y ago
      And how do you know they don't track you? I have a problem with anyone that isn't willing to open source their code.
      - BlackFly 8y ago
        There is this thing called General Data Protection Regulations for European companies. You can just ask for the information stored regarding you. People have. That's how it is known they aren't tracking.
        8y ago
js2 8y ago
Geez, I didn’t realize Google and Bing had search by image. I’m still using tineye.
- dessant 8y ago
  There are a good number of search engines for reverse image search, I've made a browser extension to search them all. https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image
tinkerteller 8y ago
These days I have same feeling about Google search results as I'd with Yahoo in late 90s. They routinely fail to identify important keywords and just ignore them. I have to put quotes on important keywords for roughly quater of my queries to avoid seeing generic stuff. For at least 10-20% of my queries, things are buried deep in to page 4 or 5 because rest of the pages are taken up by people gaming the SEO or they get ranked high because of stupid viral reason. Every person I have talked to about this has echoed this sentiment wholeheartedly. It appears that no one at Google cares anymore about all these pain people are experiencing. May be Google's internal metrics would even fail to capture this dissatisfaction because people keep using it despite of issues. Thanks to monopoly, traffic doesn't just drop. The image search by image is such an old ask that they have never got around to doing properly. Kudos to Bing for keep marching despite of our collective decision to just increase our pain threshold and stick with Google.
- itsthecourier 8y ago
  Tried bing today, failed to get me good and relevant results. What are you talking about? Google rocks. Also, edge was having troubles with YouTube dropdowns, uses bing by default and try to convince me to not change it as default browser for chrome. Horrible UX to get user to use it's inferior product
natch 8y ago
Not new. But yes useful when needed.
- EE84M3i 8y ago
  Yeah, I think this has been around for at least a year. For others reading this, if you're looking for long tail content (e.g. running a ∃ type query), my experience with reverse image engines is roughly: Yandex > Google = Bing > Tineye For niche content also worth checking KarmaDecay and SauceNao if relevant. Bing's gotten a bit better recently, and with the big boys playing in the space Tineye's quality has definitely dropped off. As far as I can tell Baidu's reverse image search is just complete garbage and never has any useful results. I rank Yandex higher than Google not because their algorithm is better (although it does seem to be a bit more tineye-style forgiving in terms of editing), but also because they seem to greedily index images they crawl in a way that google doesn't (e.g. AFAICT a lower percentage of the images available in google's text-based image search index are available for reverse-image searching than on yandex) For non long-tail reverse image searching (e.g. I just want a larger size or to find the original source) I mostly stick with Google though, because they seem to make it easiest to binary search the search timeframe like how they caught DPR. If you're on Firefox (might be a chrome version avail now too?) Image Search Options is the extension you want so you can compare the different engines with a single click. If others have good newer resources I'd be interested to hear about them.
  - natch 8y ago
    Great comment, useful info! What is that about DPR? I had to do an acronym search. Dread Pirate Roberts? Is there a good story behind this about how they caught the suspect?
    - EE84M3i 8y ago
      If I remember correctly Ulbritch was originally caught by doing basically a "git bisect" on the records associated with one of his usernames: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-unsung-tax-agent-who-put-a-face-on-the-silk-road.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-uns...
anticensor 8y ago
Does it require public URL like Google or is it based on classification?
therealmarv 8y ago
This reverse image search engines are all really fascinating (Google, Tineye, Bing, Yandex). Recently I use more and more yandex.com reverse image search because it let's me find more associated pictures of an uploaded one. Side note: It's not censoring my searches... I'm an adult and I don't need supervision from a search engine company!
e_ameisen 8y ago
Very cool, especially the cropping feature! If anybody is curious as to how you would even start to tackle the problem, I wrote a tutorial to build your own prototype here: https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-deep-learning-representations-4ce83fc663cf https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable-effecti...
anentropic 8y ago
it seems weird in this era of Machine Learning that the feature here is just an easier way for the user to experiment with different croppings of their image until they get good results

131 points by rhema 8y ago

Nice, though I use Bing daily (I am the only one, if I believe my collegues), I didn't know this exist. I do wonder however, why the search function doesn't try searching on sub-parts of the image automatically. Bing really has been improving compared to Google. I can find stuff on Bing which I can't easily find on Google because Google keeps rebuilding my search query, causing irrelevant results to show up.

rustcharm 8y ago
Bing is my primary search engine. This feature has been in Bing for at least 6 months. I love it.
jccalhoun 8y ago
I use bing as my main search engine mainly for the rewards. I've gotten quite a few $5 amazon gift cards that way over the years. However, it frequently doesn't return the results I need so I often go over to google.
- mcny 8y ago
  Does it make you verify you're a human using a real phone number? I'm trying to go 100% sim free (Google Voice, Signal, WhatsApp) but Bing doesn't recognize VoIP numbers like Google Voice.
chii 8y ago
> I do wonder however, why the search function doesn't try searching on sub-parts of the image automatically. i also wonder the same. But then it's quite a hard problem to automatically decide which part of the subimage to rerun a search (presumably, it's not free to run so many).
- nour_js 8y ago
  Actually this is a typical Machine Learning probleme, luckily was solved years ago and you can read about it here: https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-3-deep-learning-and-convolutional-neural-networks-f40359318721 https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-3-...
  - archgoon 8y ago
    I don't think that is directly applicable to this case (definitely not to the level of calling the problem 'solved'). The link describes a technique for training a neural net to detect a type of image, an '8' for example, in an image regardless of location. However, in this case, you only have one sample of the target. You could run a net to attempt to extract a list of features (children, bronze), and compare that to all your images, but I don't think that's how the bing image search is structured. That would be closer to searching for '4 children bronze park' (which it does a great job of finding such things; just nothing related to the target image). Also, when you use convolution in the way described in the article, you would lose relative position information (or at least, dampen that part of the signal) of each of the bronze statues; as the entire point is to not care about the position of the object.

kibwen 8y ago

Good to see signs that Bing isn't just in maintenance mode, I'd hate to lose what little competition in search engines we have left. I switched back to Google from Yahoo after the latter got sold to Verizon, but it occurs to me that I never really did give Bing a fair shake. I suppose now's as good a time as ever.

reaperducer 8y ago
I just finished spending two months on DuckDuckGo, and landed back on Google simply because I was tired of searching for so many things twice: once with the original search, and once with g!. I really want a Google alternative. Maybe I'll try Bing again, too.
- supernovae 8y ago
  I've used bing for over a year now, rarely ever going back to google. I'm in the USA, no reference for outside the US...
- nacs 8y ago
  Try Startpage. It proxies Google search results -- basically Google without the tracking.
  - brentadamson 8y ago
    And how do you know they don't track you? I have a problem with anyone that isn't willing to open source their code.
    - BlackFly 8y ago
      There is this thing called General Data Protection Regulations for European companies. You can just ask for the information stored regarding you. People have. That's how it is known they aren't tracking.
      - 8y ago

js2 8y ago

Geez, I didn’t realize Google and Bing had search by image. I’m still using tineye.

dessant 8y ago
There are a good number of search engines for reverse image search, I've made a browser extension to search them all. https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image

tinkerteller 8y ago

These days I have same feeling about Google search results as I'd with Yahoo in late 90s. They routinely fail to identify important keywords and just ignore them. I have to put quotes on important keywords for roughly quater of my queries to avoid seeing generic stuff. For at least 10-20% of my queries, things are buried deep in to page 4 or 5 because rest of the pages are taken up by people gaming the SEO or they get ranked high because of stupid viral reason. Every person I have talked to about this has echoed this sentiment wholeheartedly. It appears that no one at Google cares anymore about all these pain people are experiencing. May be Google's internal metrics would even fail to capture this dissatisfaction because people keep using it despite of issues. Thanks to monopoly, traffic doesn't just drop. The image search by image is such an old ask that they have never got around to doing properly. Kudos to Bing for keep marching despite of our collective decision to just increase our pain threshold and stick with Google.

itsthecourier 8y ago
Tried bing today, failed to get me good and relevant results. What are you talking about? Google rocks. Also, edge was having troubles with YouTube dropdowns, uses bing by default and try to convince me to not change it as default browser for chrome. Horrible UX to get user to use it's inferior product

natch 8y ago

Not new. But yes useful when needed.

EE84M3i 8y ago
Yeah, I think this has been around for at least a year. For others reading this, if you're looking for long tail content (e.g. running a ∃ type query), my experience with reverse image engines is roughly: Yandex > Google = Bing > Tineye For niche content also worth checking KarmaDecay and SauceNao if relevant. Bing's gotten a bit better recently, and with the big boys playing in the space Tineye's quality has definitely dropped off. As far as I can tell Baidu's reverse image search is just complete garbage and never has any useful results. I rank Yandex higher than Google not because their algorithm is better (although it does seem to be a bit more tineye-style forgiving in terms of editing), but also because they seem to greedily index images they crawl in a way that google doesn't (e.g. AFAICT a lower percentage of the images available in google's text-based image search index are available for reverse-image searching than on yandex) For non long-tail reverse image searching (e.g. I just want a larger size or to find the original source) I mostly stick with Google though, because they seem to make it easiest to binary search the search timeframe like how they caught DPR. If you're on Firefox (might be a chrome version avail now too?) Image Search Options is the extension you want so you can compare the different engines with a single click. If others have good newer resources I'd be interested to hear about them.
- natch 8y ago
  Great comment, useful info! What is that about DPR? I had to do an acronym search. Dread Pirate Roberts? Is there a good story behind this about how they caught the suspect?
  - EE84M3i 8y ago
    If I remember correctly Ulbritch was originally caught by doing basically a "git bisect" on the records associated with one of his usernames: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-unsung-tax-agent-who-put-a-face-on-the-silk-road.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-uns...

anticensor 8y ago

Does it require public URL like Google or is it based on classification?

therealmarv 8y ago

This reverse image search engines are all really fascinating (Google, Tineye, Bing, Yandex). Recently I use more and more yandex.com reverse image search because it let's me find more associated pictures of an uploaded one. Side note: It's not censoring my searches... I'm an adult and I don't need supervision from a search engine company!

e_ameisen 8y ago

Very cool, especially the cropping feature! If anybody is curious as to how you would even start to tackle the problem, I wrote a tutorial to build your own prototype here: https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-deep-learning-representations-4ce83fc663cf https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable-effecti...

anentropic 8y ago

it seems weird in this era of Machine Learning that the feature here is just an easier way for the user to experiment with different croppings of their image until they get good results