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Bing image search has solved this problem. For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of eac

Bing image search has solved this problem. For each result you can see multiple pages that include the image. It also shows the resolution and file size of each version. I did a test search for "bear" and clicked on the first result. It showed 14 different pages containing the same image with different sizes and possibly slightly different crops. You can also select a subsection of the image to search for that. It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior. I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. This is a failing of Google image search for not showing alternate matches for the same image. Bing has it figured out. I can't tell if Google just doesn't care enough about image search to implement it, or if there's some obscure patent preventing them from doing so.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gonehome 5y ago
Google's incentives are not aligned with their users. They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0] I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great. [0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Yeah google has by fiat down ranked entire classes of results and companies therein many many times... And yet Pinterest is exempt?
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    Rap Genius being the most prominent example.[0] It makes me wonder if Pinterest just has an enormous ad spend with Google and Google is unwilling to risk that. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
    - jan_Inkepa 5y ago
      Or it could be risk of monopoly-related lawsuits, right?
  - gonehome 5y ago
    The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user). They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too. Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science. Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
    - lovecg 5y ago
      Speaking of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of the time when I Google something medical related I want to get the Wikipedia page for it. Not WebMD or Mayo clinic or whatever. But Google never includes the Wikipedia link (at least on the first page of results), so I have to append “… wiki” to the search. I can only assume this is intentional.
      - glenneroo 5y ago
        Maybe one more reason to switch to DuckDuckGo with bang operators: !w <search> to search Wikipedia directly.
        5y ago
- bborud 5y ago
  The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I can remember how much we despised what they did with our technology. Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly. I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition. The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Bing's 'rewards' system is also the closest thing I've seen to Lanier's proposal of distributed data ownership - not very close to how he describes it, but closer than anything else I've seen. Microsoft has been impressing me lately.
- GordonS 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with this - can you provide a short summary of what it is, or point towards a link please?
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    This is a good link - I used an outdated term, he uses the term 'data dignity' now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHt98WE5FxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHt98WE5FxU My summation of the idea is that data is very valuable and will be more valuable in the future, but that because the value of a dataset goes up nonlinearly with its size, only the wealthiest will have the means to extract (significant) value from datasets in the future. This will cause massive societal inequality unless the people who create the data are guaranteed a piece of the value created by companies with the server farms necessary to actually create value out of the data we're constantly producing.
visarga 5y ago
> It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior. Yandex image search is also great, you can do semantic search by image and crop, much more advanced than Google. It's so good it feels like Pinterest without the fluff and user accounts.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Yandex reverse image search actually does what's it's supposed to, I use it a lot these days. Google at some point replaced identifying the exact image and finding different sizes/versions into some sort of machine learning problem where it tries (poorly) to identify the content of the image then shows you images that look similar but are usually not what you actually want.
  - gs17 5y ago
    Exactly. Someone online posted an interesting comic book page and I wanted to know what it was from. Google gave me a random word and a bunch of unrelated images. Yandex needed me to use their cropping tool (the image I had was a two page spread), but found it immediately after.
  - taneq 5y ago
    Huh, Yandex does it too? I’ve been using TinEye for years and years for this.
- green01 5y ago
  +1 for Yandex, it also works for black/white images ie. manga which Google Images can't handle at all.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Anything you do on Yandex you should probably "sandbox" via either a firefox container or private browser session since it's Russia based.
loudmax 5y ago
Regardless of "cool or popular" there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Microsoft more power over computing infrastructure. For that matter, there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Google more power as well. In either case, the reasons go well beyond what's fashionable.
- sweetbitter 5y ago
  What do you propose, a distributed search engine like YaCy?
Miner49er 5y ago
Yeah it's not Pinterest, it's Google image search. It's been horrible for many years now, but really got bad when they stopped letting you go straight to the image and instead forcing you to the page the image is on.
- thrashh 5y ago
  They only did that because they got sued.
- csapdani 5y ago
  'Right click -> Open image in new tab' still works.
  - muspimerol 5y ago
    This doesn't always give you the full size image. Often you have to visit the page, then search to find the image, then get the source.
    - helloworld11 5y ago
      Quick tip: sometimes the tiny image thing happens because you right-click to open the image in another tab before it has finished loading in the Google side-column it was in. It's good to give it a moment to fully load, than right-click. Tedious, I know, but helpful maybe.
      - mike741 5y ago
        i waited a full minute before right-click -> open image in new tab, and it still opens the thumbnail-sized image instead of the original. i tried the side-column as well and got the same result. EDIT: strange, i tried the same process again on the same image and this time it worked! i guess it really is a cache-related issue
        helloworld11 5y ago
mdoms 5y ago
> I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. That's a bit reductive. I agree Google shares some blame, but Pinterest engages in some pretty serious black hat SEO techniques. This is well documented (and sadly not covered by this article, despite its title).
saurik 5y ago
I also highly recommend Yandex's image search; and, while it is super hard for an English speaker to use, Baidu's is phenomenal... Google is really just the one that sucks at this point.
- soco 5y ago
  I suppose phenomenal if you happen to search for CCP-vetted content.
kingcharles 5y ago
Also, Bing's censorship algorithms are much weaker than Google's, so you get more results from more risqué sites.
ilamont 5y ago
> Bing has it figured out. Except when images are scrubbed from results, such as "Tank Man." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 Microsoft blamed "accidental human error": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774
thunderbong 5y ago
Not just images. I've noticed that Bing also gives results which helps me fine tune the search terms better to get more accurate results. Most of the time Google gives me a correct result ONLY if I know exactly what I'm searching for. But that's usually not the case. Even for technical searches, I notice that many times, Bing gives a more varied search result which helps me. Conversely, on Google after the first few links, the rest seem to skip some words from my search entirely. It feels as if Google is just trying to give me links to fill up the page and then I have to go back and put double-quotes against each term. Even after all that, I only get what I want more and more rarely. Of late, I notice myself relying on Bing more frequently.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  When I hit "next page" a lot (because the first page of google results is often crap these days) google gets extremely aggressive about "we've noticed unusual activity from this address" and they make me do a captcha. Well hello! If you'd stop burying the good results I wouldn't have to ask for so many! And that's yet another reason why I mostly use DDG/Bing now.
  - kyleee 5y ago
    Same thing happens to me. It just goes to show the disdain they have for users who don't just click an ad on the front page like they want
- techload 5y ago
  Exactly that!
concinds 5y ago
After reading [0], I wouldn't want to use Bing without at least a VPN. Not sure if Microsoft has fixed this already, but I don't want to rely on governments/ISPs/anyone on the network knowing the difference between a user-initiated request and an AJAX request for search suggestions. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searches_related_searches_badly_almost_cost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searc... and https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_searches_related_searches_badly_almost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_sea...
thatsnotmepls 5y ago
I just opened bing and saw a bear on my homepage, what magic is this?
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Probably metrics saying that a lot of traffic with cookies from ycombinator are searching for "bear"
_trampeltier 5y ago
Jup, bing is so much better than google for image search.
seoulmetro 5y ago
Google's search is the best in the world. They're just locking it up and cutting its wings so to speak. They flipped a switch a long time ago to stop the image searches being accurate or allowing actual advanced usage. It was scarily good for a while before that.
rbanffy 5y ago
A simple solution would be to have a “-site” option for the search. The same way you can use “site:.gov” to only return .gov domains, we should be able to “-site:Pinterest.com” to never see that noise again.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  You can do this in Google with -site: without quotes. Not sure if Bing or others support that modifier.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Wow! I tried more than once and gave up. It never seemed to work.
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      The -x modifier in Google is basically a NOT “x” if I understand my Boolean operators correctly. The - can be combined with other operators to NOR instead of AND. Hope that helps. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
spurgu 5y ago
There's still the issue of false hope. Every now and then I'm looking for something specific that I don't necessarily know what it's called, but I know I'll recognize it when I see it. So I try different queries, and finally find something that looks exactly like it so I click, but end up on Pinterest, where there's generally zero information about the image. It's just a piece of someones random collection. Plus the login-wall of course. Even the most basic website would have at least some information about the image. To clarify, this isn't an issue if you get multiple versions of the image, in that case one of them is hopefully not from Pinterest.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gonehome 5y ago

Google's incentives are not aligned with their users. They used to recognize that long term it's better to make the decision that the users would want even if it's worse short term. The company was founded on this principle when Larry and Sergey tried to sell pagerank to Overature search (iirc) - the Overature ceo at the time said good results were bad because users would leave the 'portal' page too soon and not see enough ads. That's partly what lead to them creating their own company. [0] I'd guess Google is making an Overature like mistake today. I guess it could also be failure to operate on stuff like this at scale, which also isn't great. [0]: I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this from Levy's In The Plex, but I read it years ago so not 100% sure this is accurate.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Yeah google has by fiat down ranked entire classes of results and companies therein many many times... And yet Pinterest is exempt?
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Rap Genius being the most prominent example.[0] It makes me wonder if Pinterest just has an enormous ad spend with Google and Google is unwilling to risk that. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
  - jan_Inkepa 5y ago
    Or it could be risk of monopoly-related lawsuits, right?
- gonehome 5y ago
  The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user). They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too. Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science. Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
  - lovecg 5y ago
    Speaking of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of the time when I Google something medical related I want to get the Wikipedia page for it. Not WebMD or Mayo clinic or whatever. But Google never includes the Wikipedia link (at least on the first page of results), so I have to append “… wiki” to the search. I can only assume this is intentional.
    - glenneroo 5y ago
      Maybe one more reason to switch to DuckDuckGo with bang operators: !w <search> to search Wikipedia directly.
      - 5y ago
bborud 5y ago
The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I can remember how much we despised what they did with our technology. Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly. I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition. The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

Bing's 'rewards' system is also the closest thing I've seen to Lanier's proposal of distributed data ownership - not very close to how he describes it, but closer than anything else I've seen. Microsoft has been impressing me lately.

GordonS 5y ago
I'm not familiar with this - can you provide a short summary of what it is, or point towards a link please?
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  This is a good link - I used an outdated term, he uses the term 'data dignity' now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHt98WE5FxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHt98WE5FxU My summation of the idea is that data is very valuable and will be more valuable in the future, but that because the value of a dataset goes up nonlinearly with its size, only the wealthiest will have the means to extract (significant) value from datasets in the future. This will cause massive societal inequality unless the people who create the data are guaranteed a piece of the value created by companies with the server farms necessary to actually create value out of the data we're constantly producing.

visarga 5y ago

> It makes Google image search feel like an old school internet tool. I know Bing isn't cool or popular, but their image search is undeniably superior. Yandex image search is also great, you can do semantic search by image and crop, much more advanced than Google. It's so good it feels like Pinterest without the fluff and user accounts.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Yandex reverse image search actually does what's it's supposed to, I use it a lot these days. Google at some point replaced identifying the exact image and finding different sizes/versions into some sort of machine learning problem where it tries (poorly) to identify the content of the image then shows you images that look similar but are usually not what you actually want.
- gs17 5y ago
  Exactly. Someone online posted an interesting comic book page and I wanted to know what it was from. Google gave me a random word and a bunch of unrelated images. Yandex needed me to use their cropping tool (the image I had was a two page spread), but found it immediately after.
- taneq 5y ago
  Huh, Yandex does it too? I’ve been using TinEye for years and years for this.
green01 5y ago
+1 for Yandex, it also works for black/white images ie. manga which Google Images can't handle at all.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Anything you do on Yandex you should probably "sandbox" via either a firefox container or private browser session since it's Russia based.

loudmax 5y ago

Regardless of "cool or popular" there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Microsoft more power over computing infrastructure. For that matter, there are legitimate reasons not to want to give Google more power as well. In either case, the reasons go well beyond what's fashionable.

sweetbitter 5y ago
What do you propose, a distributed search engine like YaCy?

Miner49er 5y ago

Yeah it's not Pinterest, it's Google image search. It's been horrible for many years now, but really got bad when they stopped letting you go straight to the image and instead forcing you to the page the image is on.

thrashh 5y ago
They only did that because they got sued.
csapdani 5y ago
'Right click -> Open image in new tab' still works.
- muspimerol 5y ago
  This doesn't always give you the full size image. Often you have to visit the page, then search to find the image, then get the source.
  - helloworld11 5y ago
    Quick tip: sometimes the tiny image thing happens because you right-click to open the image in another tab before it has finished loading in the Google side-column it was in. It's good to give it a moment to fully load, than right-click. Tedious, I know, but helpful maybe.
    - mike741 5y ago
      i waited a full minute before right-click -> open image in new tab, and it still opens the thumbnail-sized image instead of the original. i tried the side-column as well and got the same result. EDIT: strange, i tried the same process again on the same image and this time it worked! i guess it really is a cache-related issue
      - helloworld11 5y ago

mdoms 5y ago

> I don't think we need to blame Pinterest for having indexable content. That's a bit reductive. I agree Google shares some blame, but Pinterest engages in some pretty serious black hat SEO techniques. This is well documented (and sadly not covered by this article, despite its title).

saurik 5y ago

I also highly recommend Yandex's image search; and, while it is super hard for an English speaker to use, Baidu's is phenomenal... Google is really just the one that sucks at this point.

soco 5y ago
I suppose phenomenal if you happen to search for CCP-vetted content.

kingcharles 5y ago

Also, Bing's censorship algorithms are much weaker than Google's, so you get more results from more risqué sites.

ilamont 5y ago

> Bing has it figured out. Except when images are scrubbed from results, such as "Tank Man." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 Microsoft blamed "accidental human error": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400774

thunderbong 5y ago

Not just images. I've noticed that Bing also gives results which helps me fine tune the search terms better to get more accurate results. Most of the time Google gives me a correct result ONLY if I know exactly what I'm searching for. But that's usually not the case. Even for technical searches, I notice that many times, Bing gives a more varied search result which helps me. Conversely, on Google after the first few links, the rest seem to skip some words from my search entirely. It feels as if Google is just trying to give me links to fill up the page and then I have to go back and put double-quotes against each term. Even after all that, I only get what I want more and more rarely. Of late, I notice myself relying on Bing more frequently.

dreamcompiler 5y ago
When I hit "next page" a lot (because the first page of google results is often crap these days) google gets extremely aggressive about "we've noticed unusual activity from this address" and they make me do a captcha. Well hello! If you'd stop burying the good results I wouldn't have to ask for so many! And that's yet another reason why I mostly use DDG/Bing now.
- kyleee 5y ago
  Same thing happens to me. It just goes to show the disdain they have for users who don't just click an ad on the front page like they want
techload 5y ago
Exactly that!

concinds 5y ago

After reading [0], I wouldn't want to use Bing without at least a VPN. Not sure if Microsoft has fixed this already, but I don't want to rely on governments/ISPs/anyone on the network knowing the difference between a user-initiated request and an AJAX request for search suggestions. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searches_related_searches_badly_almost_cost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2gzi9/bing_searc... and https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_searches_related_searches_badly_almost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/p2q4kw/rebing_sea...

thatsnotmepls 5y ago

I just opened bing and saw a bear on my homepage, what magic is this?

BizarroLand 5y ago
Probably metrics saying that a lot of traffic with cookies from ycombinator are searching for "bear"

_trampeltier 5y ago

Jup, bing is so much better than google for image search.

seoulmetro 5y ago

Google's search is the best in the world. They're just locking it up and cutting its wings so to speak. They flipped a switch a long time ago to stop the image searches being accurate or allowing actual advanced usage. It was scarily good for a while before that.

rbanffy 5y ago

A simple solution would be to have a “-site” option for the search. The same way you can use “site:.gov” to only return .gov domains, we should be able to “-site:Pinterest.com” to never see that noise again.

aspenmayer 5y ago
You can do this in Google with -site: without quotes. Not sure if Bing or others support that modifier.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Wow! I tried more than once and gave up. It never seemed to work.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    The -x modifier in Google is basically a NOT “x” if I understand my Boolean operators correctly. The - can be combined with other operators to NOR instead of AND. Hope that helps. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

spurgu 5y ago

There's still the issue of false hope. Every now and then I'm looking for something specific that I don't necessarily know what it's called, but I know I'll recognize it when I see it. So I try different queries, and finally find something that looks exactly like it so I click, but end up on Pinterest, where there's generally zero information about the image. It's just a piece of someones random collection. Plus the login-wall of course. Even the most basic website would have at least some information about the image. To clarify, this isn't an issue if you get multiple versions of the image, in that case one of them is hopefully not from Pinterest.