13 ms·

Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons

368 points by colinprince 4y ago

cogdog 4y ago
Thanks for the HN treatment. As a followup piece, a Google response of this being "a bug". Followup story, my return rate for CC licensed images of "dog" went from 3 to 13. More than that, license info is not displayed (only linked), is frequently wrong, and photo credits often given to the site, not the creator of the image. https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/google-cc-image-search-better-sad/ https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/google-cc-image-search-better... Try Openverse for much more accurate and plentiful results https://wordpress.org/openverse/ https://wordpress.org/openverse/
bgro 4y ago
I've been somewhat thoroughly testing Google text/image search by coincidence. I'll share my experience about some oddities here. I do somewhat unusual things, like search for parts of a joke or a string of semi-randomly generated words for part of an AI type thing I'm working on creating to see if these are either unique or original and how they may appear in the context of the internet. Often times, if anything, there's something like a banned twitter (bot?) account only available through a cached backup that said it once in some bizarre context. I've noticed it significantly can change search results depending on if you're logged in, or the country you're searching from (via a VPN). Different countries have different levels of success for different types of searches, but I don't have any sort of solid guide to map this out in any shareable way. Boot up a virtual machine on a VPN if you're curious to take a look yourself. You may need to manipulate it so you don't bring in any suspicious cookies or other identifying information to show your actual country. Some VPN IPs are well known, and your results may be manipulated anyway. Some results literally will never show up if you're searching from the USA. If you switch to Hungary for example, suddenly things could start appearing. Even if the matching result is a Chinese site that should have relatively equal relevance to both countries. Sometimes I use Bing. It's not exactly better, but it's also not really worse. It's just different. In my non-scientific opinion after seeing so many of these differences, it's because it feels like they just forgot to enable (or haven't yet gotten to enabling) the kind of filtering Google has. If something is no longer showing up in Google search, using Bing feels like going back 1 relative year in time before Google nerfed your active search. Sometimes I suspect Google is breaking down searches to parsable keywords and then sometimes adding those to a blacklist. DuckDuckGo seems to sometimes filter things too, and some of the other commonly recommended alternative search engines. I don't know if they're actively doing this, or if it's a byproduct of forking off some other engine. I don't have much information here because I've largely given up bothering with these. There's some other large engines not widely discussed in the US I am currently looking at as well. I don't have enough experience to form a solid opinion yet, and I have suspicion of their privacy so I don't want to be loosely associated with recommending it until I know more. Miscellaneous other thoughts around this topic: - Google has been heavily pushing some results more than others obviously. Pinterest and Quora are always at the top of searches now. I think this is pretty common knowledge. - Chrome has a right click -> Search with Google Lens button now. Are they working on AI object detection of images more so than a visual match now? Could this factor into image matches? - TinEye - When looking into this question myself, a lot of people recommend TinEye. I've literally never had TinEye actually match a picture by the way. Am I using it wrong?
- noidiocyallowed 4y ago
  Google Lens is just terrible. Really terrible. I don't know what the hell they are doing there :D. Tineye is also useless. They have a very outdated library or not crawling spaces they should be crawling.
cloutchaser 4y ago
I've noticed recently almost all broad searches on image search return watermarked stock photos. It's terrible. The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool. Anyway, they either have some serious legal issues with image search or they are becoming precautionary, but it's becoming almost impossible to find decent images.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  After they were sued a few years ago, Google seems to have neglected this product. Bing is way better.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    It's a common pattern... No good engineer wants to work on a product with their feet stuck in legal quicksand. So all the good engineers leave, and the product stagnates with no direction. Even if the lawsuit is won, the product is still doomed.
- CamelCaseName 4y ago
  With any luck DALL-E will undo this. What if one day every Google search has an "auto-generated" panel of images as well?
  - sdflhasjd 4y ago
    IMO, DALL-E suffers from the same problem because it's been trained on the very same boring stock photos.
- Kye 4y ago
  >> "The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool." Only the bad, outdated stock photos. There is still a whole market for the "obviously corporate corporate website" corporate website, but that's falling out of fashion. What you're thinking of are the bland, white backgrounded photos and photos shot in stale, generic office settings so they could be worked into any design. That's not really how it's done anymore. Modern stuff doesn't look posed and staged, and often isn't.
cainxinth 4y ago
I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for. Image search is another story. I've been less and less satisfied with Google Image search results, and visual search has been totally neutered. It only returns low res results that rarely match the original as well as it used to. I used to be able to plug in a 400x400 image and find a dozen copies of it at a usable size. No more. Too many copyright complaints, I assume. I've started using Bing for image and visual search now. It's not as good as old Google Images, but marginally better in some cases than the current iteration.
- rplnt 4y ago
  > my Google-fu is strong The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible to find something older, obscure, things from other regions, languages, etc...
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
      I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites. "Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.
projproj 4y ago
I made canweimage.com. It can't replace all the features of Google, but it can fit the bill if you just need a basic search of Creative Commons.
- an1sotropy 4y ago
  Thanks! But just to be clear, it isn’t somehow searching all things under a CC license, but just things within wikimedia right?
  - input_sh 4y ago
    Last time I checked, Creative Commons had their own search for things under their licenses. But now apparently that project got transferred to WordPress and is now named Openverse: https://wordpress.org/openverse/?referrer=creativecommons.org https://wordpress.org/openverse/?referrer=creativecommons.or... Anyways, I'd argue that's the most comprehensive database of CC-licensed works.
    - an1sotropy 4y ago
      Thanks for this. Also, I just checked that flickr.com still allows you to filter their searches by license.
- freediver 4y ago
  This looks great. Care to share the API call used for searhing?
  - projproj 4y ago
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=search&gsrnamespace=6&gsrsearch=<url-encoded https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generat... search term here>&format=json (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query for reference) edit: formatting
eli 4y ago
Unfortunately you can't really be sure that an image with metadata claiming it is CC licensed is actually CC licensed or that the website offering it has the permission of the author. I have been burned by this.
- ficiek 4y ago
  You can say the same about anything. I am guessing you don't use anything that is open source in any capacity and don't buy any proprietary software and libraries in case they are lying and they can't actually distribute them?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    True. Although an additional wrinkle with Creative Commons is that, depending upon how conservative you want to be and how the copyright owner interprets terms like non-commercial and what constitutes appropriate attribution, there are all sorts of variations that may or may not be suitable for a given use. Of course, for many casual purposes it's widely ignored and for photos of people used for advertising and marketing, you need a model release anyway.
  - eli 4y ago
    Sure. But this actually happened. I've been twice bitten by using images that claimed to be CC and then an apparent copyright owner appeared and said otherwise. I've never had that happen with open source software. I think copyright trolling is more prevalent with images, and I think it's generally easier to determine the canonical origin of software. But yes, it's absolutely a risk and a reason why many companies have a legal review process before any new libraries can be used.
  - gernb 4y ago
    To add what others are saying. I CC-BY all my photos but just because the photo is CC-BY doesn't mean it's safe to use. I don't know all the other "rights" but for example a photo I took of Mickey Mouse, or a movie poster, or a photo I took of some art in a museum may have additional rights issues. Even pictures of buildings https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/known-image-restrictions.html https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/known-image-r... Note: I get that adobe might be wrong here. Whether they are right or wrong on particulars is beside the point. I just linked there because it was clearer than most other search results I found. Here's another https://mymodernmet.com/eiffel-tower-copyright-law/ https://mymodernmet.com/eiffel-tower-copyright-law/
Kalanos 4y ago
did not know this was a feature and i use the advanced filters a lot
tssva 4y ago
I'm a little confused by part of this article. The author states part of the evidence they used for deciding something was wrong is that a search not restricted to Creative Commons licensed images included many images with open source licenses and some in the public domain. If you restrict your search to Creative Commons licensed images why would you expect images under other open source licenses or in the public domain to be returned?
footlose_3815 4y ago
Is there a better creative commons search engine that will only return free media?
- macintux 4y ago
  The article and comments promote this alternative: https://wordpress.org/openverse/ https://wordpress.org/openverse/
- katabasis 4y ago
  Wikimedia Commons recently introduced a new MediaSearch feature (everything there is free by definition): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch
shadowgovt 4y ago
The key point here is "... and hardly anyone noticed." In theory, site reliability engineers and software engineers work together at Google to maintain existing functionality and check for regressions. In practice, regression checks can only cover what they've been told to cover, and if breaking a feature doesn't cause a metric to crash, Site Reliability doesn't have the information to know something is wrong. The result is that generally speaking, Google prioritizes existing features by how popular they are (i.e. "Maintenance by Popularity") modulo how much of a stink someone influential can make if they screw it up (i.e. "Maintenance by Twitter."). If almost nobody uses the CC filter (and I bet, in the grand scheme of things, they don't), Google may not have enough signal to know they broke the filter unless someone had the foresight to add a metric to check search results on that query separate from the rest of the search result data (and at Google's scale, you can't just add a metric for free; in addition to eng-hours to build and tune it, the data has to be stored somewhere and teams have finite budgets for space that can only be grown by negotiation with the relevant teams managing the monitoring services or the project as a whole).
- Thaxll 4y ago
  At some point you reach a complexity level that even the engineers don't even know how it's supposed to work. I mean someone type something on google the result is not what is expected how do you troubleshoot that or know that it's a regression?
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  ...or they screw it up, make it worse and worse, and less and less people use it, making it less popular, less chance someone fixes it, less people use it, less chance, less people, less, less, google graveyard. Both google image search and "normal" google search are becoming more and more a pain to use, where you have to use quotemarks on pretty much everything plus a few excludes to find anything at all.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Yep. This is definitely the flip-side of Google's process. It makes some sense; take a step back, and the story is "If Google software engineers don't care enough to make it good, and Google users don't care enough to keep using it in spite of its flaws, why is Google throwing money at it at all?" Google is a weird company because so many priorities are set by software engineers, not managers; some projects die because they literally run out of passionate engineers to work on them and management isn't incentivized to force engineers to work on projects they hate, instead asking the question "If nobody wants to work on this, is it worth it to keep doing it?"
O__________O 4y ago
Creative Commons always felt broken to me. Is anyone able to explain why following is not flawed and not possible, that is: Content thief steals contents anonymously, posts it as Creative Commons content anonymously using free hosting, archives the content on Way Back, and then uses content claiming it is Creative Commons if anyone asks? Basically it is content laundering - and something that impossible for Creative Commons to address as is. (If reasoning is not flawed, also interested in possible solution to the issue.)
- dleslie 4y ago
  Your scheme would apply for any sort of licensing, permissive or not, and is certainly not constrained to using creative commons. It's also flawed in the same, albeit weak, manner: the source it was stolen from predates the stolen copies, and so can show its true provenance. Of course, if it wasn't published or otherwise registered, no one would know.
- bityard 4y ago
  > Basically it is content laundering - and something that impossible for Creative Commons to address as is. CC is just a usage license that authors can apply to their works in order to share them freely with the world. It's strange to me that you might think it is the job of CC to police how people (mis)use it?
- alt227 4y ago
  This is no different from stealing something physical in the real world, and then claiming its yours. Sure some people will believe you and be impressed, but as soon as you attract the attention of the original owner, they will use the law to prove it is not yours but theirs. This is applicable to anything that can be 'owned'. Licensing only dictates how something can be used lawfully, the law protects the license from being abused.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
I think this is not that there are only three dog pictures because Google broke CC. I think this is more of a Google/ML/etc. "over-helping". If I click on all the other dog pictures bar ("german shepherd, puppy, baby, rottweiler, police", etc. right below the option to select size, color type, time, licenses) additional CC images show up of the selected sub-type. The selection is additive (and) filters. It is more that Google deciding what I really want.
varispeed 4y ago
I stopped using Image Search like a year ago, simply because it is useless. You cannot find anything. Personal anecdote - I was at a specialist doctor to discuss the results of my tests. I was shocked when he typed a health issue to Google Image search, clicked on (what seemed to me) a random table matching his search terms and compared it with my results. He then said that everything is fine, the parameters are normal. That got me scared, what if someone intentionally put a doctored table and used SEO to promote it to the top to mislead doctors and causing bad outcomes to patients?
gwbas1c 4y ago
One thing with any query parameter API like this is that there's no guaranteed signal when the API has breaking changes. I'm going to assume that there are hundreds or thousands of products, tools, hobby projects, ect, that direct to Google searches; none of which have any mechanism to know and break gracefully when the API changes. Furthermore, Google is under no obligation to coordinate with anyone who just arbitrarily send queries their way. (I've had a few hobby projects use Google Queries.) Seems like the most we could really ask is to put some kind of version stamp into the query parameter; and Google could optionally support old parameters or simply return an error. Otherwise, we have to accept that sending browsers to other pages via query parameters is inherently fragile and has a high probability of breaking at any time.
shortformblog 4y ago
I noticed. I use this tool all the time. Now Google just made it useless.
cf141q5325 4y ago
Its not just creative commons images. In case you havent noticed, those billions of search results have max out between page 20 and 40 for a while now.
therealmarv 4y ago
Google Image Search is deteriorating in certain areas for years. Namely: * Reverse Image Search (sometimes no matches although image is for sure out there). I wonder if Reverse Image search sometimes broken because of copyright? * NSFW images (I'm really old enough and I don't need to be protected by Google or anyone else, I think it's a kind of censorship) * And now also Creative Commons as pointed out by Op The best alternative (tested them all) is in my opinion https://yandex.com/images/ https://yandex.com/images/ Chrome extension for reverse image search supporting Yandex https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fast-image-research/epelbghekfokpolcmhhabjgehmplhjgp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fast-image-researc... Android app supporting Yandex for Reverse Image Search https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinkfree.searchbyimage https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinkfree.... P.S.: I know Yandex is based in Russia, I only use it for specific image searches and I'm happy we have a good alternative based outside of USA... I wished there were more in the World.
- Wazako 4y ago
  It's amazing how they have destroyed the reverse image search for the last 3/4 years. It's since the switch to ML and the identification of keywords, they don't seem to have image hash search anymore.
- neither_color 4y ago
  For image search Bing is actually decent, and doesn't serve you webp.
  - therealmarv 4y ago
    Bing is second best after Yandex and better than Google sometimes. But Yandex still outperforms in my subjective view especially on Reverse Image search.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Hrmm, I tried reverse-searching for the last photo I took - of the USNS John Glenn at the port of Oakland - and both Yandex and Google return similar results, but the Google result returns instantly and Yandex took nearly a minute. What's an example of a search where Yandex does much better?
jrochkind1 4y ago
Does anyone know how Google Image Search (or Bing Image Search[1]) identify images as creative commons or public domain in the first place? If I'm a content provider that wants to maximize the chances that an image search will flag my images as CC or public domain, what should I do? Are there open graph or other meta tags? Or what? [1]: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:license-L1&first=1&tsc=ImageHoverTitle https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:lice...
- visarga 4y ago
  Probably they have a license classifier trained on thousands of pages that have been manually checked.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
I fear this may be a feature no one at Google is actively caring about anymore. Here's Matt Cutts' tweet about it in 2014: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/422944316458168320 https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/422944316458168320 But I think it dates back to 2009? https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/find-creative-commons-images-with-image.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/find-creative-common...
elashri 4y ago
I am using `kagi` as my search engine. While reading the article I searched `sur:fmc` [0]. The first result was a site that gives information about search urls [1] and gives correct description of what is the function of `sur:fmc`. I couldn't find this page on the first 5 pages on google [2] (and didn't look further). Not to mention google trying to correct me the query text. [0] https://kagi.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc https://kagi.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc [1] https://sites.google.com/a/arps.org/esresearch/images https://sites.google.com/a/arps.org/esresearch/images [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc https://www.google.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc
- dmonitor 4y ago
  $10/mo is a really hard sell for something I can get for free, but if it's actually useful I would be very tempted
  - tylermenezes 4y ago
    Kagi is great! I have to use Google for only about 5% of searches with Kagi, vs about 40% with DDG. I was genuinely surprised
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    IMO, it's worth it. People spend that much on Starbucks every day. The key feature I like about Kagi is that being able to downrank or outright block certain domains is built right in. I also like that it doesn't throw a bunch of crap on to the page above the fold and it doesn't pretend that it found results when it finds no matches.
- rntksi 4y ago
  Guessing "ur" in sur means Usage Rights, and M means Modification, C means Commercial, F means Free (to reuse)?
- noidiocyallowed 4y ago
  Kagi search? It said something like after I exceeded my daily search limit in the trials: "Go search somewhere else". I mean, who are these snotty kids, that have the audacity to talk down on people? Not gonna spend my money there for sure. Kagi is good, but get a proper PR person and don't let imbeciles ruin the experience.
pGuitar 4y ago
Yandex is better for image search.... specially reverse image search.
itvision 4y ago
Google image search has been broken for at least two years now - looks like Google does not give a damn. I remember it could find 5 to 20 times more pictures than before, you could actually trace images to their sources - this has become impossible. Why? I've no idea. Then they disabled the Google web cache which was hugely useful since it allowed to open dead website/webpages or allowed to browse something when your government restricts access to it. I guess the copyright lobby and China forced the removal of this feature. Google search is still unmatched in terms of being able to find text but other features have seen a huge cut. :-( And don't remind me about iGoogle. I loved it. https://web.archive.org/web/20160314122329/http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/files/fonts_example2.png https://web.archive.org/web/20160314122329/http://linuxfonts...
bacchusracine 4y ago
People still use Google Image search?
Hard_Space 4y ago
I go to Yandex for image search first, these days, especially if I want to do an image-based search. Whatever you may think of it, Yandex uses both facial ID and object recognition, and will return side-results that are both visually and semantically related to the uploaded image. Google Images, on the other hand, seems to look for the nearest monetizable domain cued by the uploaded image, and gives you adjacent results about that. It certainly does no facial recognition, etc. (well, none that it will feed back to you in results, anyway).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lovelearning 4y ago
I have noticed multiple problems in Google search results. But I don't give them any feedback because I don't feel helping Google become better, and therefore more dominant, is the right thing to do long-term.
gernb 4y ago
134k results on flickr https://flickr.com/search/?text=dog&license=2%2C3%2C4%2C5%2C6%2C9 https://flickr.com/search/?text=dog&license=2%2C3%2C4%2C5%2C...
jeffwask 4y ago
Google's ad delivery platform is become a less and less reliable search engine as it's sideline. Support alternate search engines, we used to have a bunch of viable options. Let's get back to that.
dannysullivan 4y ago
I'm with Google Search. I tweeted to the author of the post, but will also share -- this looks to be a bug that we're tracking down. Definitely not what we'd have expected or wanting to have happen for a queries of this nature.
- kderbyma 4y ago
  Sorry, but it's more than a bug. it's blatant manipulation. you even acknowledge it as much just claim it is to fight extremists, but the truth is you neutered the platform in 2016
katabasis 4y ago
I encourage anyone looking for freely-reusable images to try the new MediaSearch feature on Wikimedia Commons. Also works for other types of media files. All images on Commons are free to reuse but there is also a license filter if you are looking for more specific permissions in terms of attribution, etc. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch
kazinator 4y ago
> Who Locked the CC Dogs Out? Says the person who puts their stuff into Flickr, which requires an account.

368 points by colinprince 4y ago

Thanks for the HN treatment. As a followup piece, a Google response of this being "a bug". Followup story, my return rate for CC licensed images of "dog" went from 3 to 13. More than that, license info is not displayed (only linked), is frequently wrong, and photo credits often given to the site, not the creator of the image. https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/google-cc-image-search-better-sad/ https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/google-cc-image-search-better... Try Openverse for much more accurate and plentiful results https://wordpress.org/openverse/ https://wordpress.org/openverse/

bgro 4y ago

I've been somewhat thoroughly testing Google text/image search by coincidence. I'll share my experience about some oddities here. I do somewhat unusual things, like search for parts of a joke or a string of semi-randomly generated words for part of an AI type thing I'm working on creating to see if these are either unique or original and how they may appear in the context of the internet. Often times, if anything, there's something like a banned twitter (bot?) account only available through a cached backup that said it once in some bizarre context. I've noticed it significantly can change search results depending on if you're logged in, or the country you're searching from (via a VPN). Different countries have different levels of success for different types of searches, but I don't have any sort of solid guide to map this out in any shareable way. Boot up a virtual machine on a VPN if you're curious to take a look yourself. You may need to manipulate it so you don't bring in any suspicious cookies or other identifying information to show your actual country. Some VPN IPs are well known, and your results may be manipulated anyway. Some results literally will never show up if you're searching from the USA. If you switch to Hungary for example, suddenly things could start appearing. Even if the matching result is a Chinese site that should have relatively equal relevance to both countries. Sometimes I use Bing. It's not exactly better, but it's also not really worse. It's just different. In my non-scientific opinion after seeing so many of these differences, it's because it feels like they just forgot to enable (or haven't yet gotten to enabling) the kind of filtering Google has. If something is no longer showing up in Google search, using Bing feels like going back 1 relative year in time before Google nerfed your active search. Sometimes I suspect Google is breaking down searches to parsable keywords and then sometimes adding those to a blacklist. DuckDuckGo seems to sometimes filter things too, and some of the other commonly recommended alternative search engines. I don't know if they're actively doing this, or if it's a byproduct of forking off some other engine. I don't have much information here because I've largely given up bothering with these. There's some other large engines not widely discussed in the US I am currently looking at as well. I don't have enough experience to form a solid opinion yet, and I have suspicion of their privacy so I don't want to be loosely associated with recommending it until I know more. Miscellaneous other thoughts around this topic: - Google has been heavily pushing some results more than others obviously. Pinterest and Quora are always at the top of searches now. I think this is pretty common knowledge. - Chrome has a right click -> Search with Google Lens button now. Are they working on AI object detection of images more so than a visual match now? Could this factor into image matches? - TinEye - When looking into this question myself, a lot of people recommend TinEye. I've literally never had TinEye actually match a picture by the way. Am I using it wrong?

noidiocyallowed 4y ago
Google Lens is just terrible. Really terrible. I don't know what the hell they are doing there :D. Tineye is also useless. They have a very outdated library or not crawling spaces they should be crawling.

cloutchaser 4y ago

I've noticed recently almost all broad searches on image search return watermarked stock photos. It's terrible. The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool. Anyway, they either have some serious legal issues with image search or they are becoming precautionary, but it's becoming almost impossible to find decent images.

Spooky23 4y ago
After they were sued a few years ago, Google seems to have neglected this product. Bing is way better.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  It's a common pattern... No good engineer wants to work on a product with their feet stuck in legal quicksand. So all the good engineers leave, and the product stagnates with no direction. Even if the lawsuit is won, the product is still doomed.
CamelCaseName 4y ago
With any luck DALL-E will undo this. What if one day every Google search has an "auto-generated" panel of images as well?
- sdflhasjd 4y ago
  IMO, DALL-E suffers from the same problem because it's been trained on the very same boring stock photos.
Kye 4y ago
>> "The entire stock photo industry is so bad at creativity you can basically instantly tell if a photo is a stock photo, making anyone using them look like a complete fool." Only the bad, outdated stock photos. There is still a whole market for the "obviously corporate corporate website" corporate website, but that's falling out of fashion. What you're thinking of are the bland, white backgrounded photos and photos shot in stale, generic office settings so they could be worked into any design. That's not really how it's done anymore. Modern stuff doesn't look posed and staged, and often isn't.

cainxinth 4y ago

I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for. Image search is another story. I've been less and less satisfied with Google Image search results, and visual search has been totally neutered. It only returns low res results that rarely match the original as well as it used to. I used to be able to plug in a 400x400 image and find a dozen copies of it at a usable size. No more. Too many copyright complaints, I assume. I've started using Bing for image and visual search now. It's not as good as old Google Images, but marginally better in some cases than the current iteration.

rplnt 4y ago
> my Google-fu is strong The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible to find something older, obscure, things from other regions, languages, etc...
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites. "Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.

projproj 4y ago

I made canweimage.com. It can't replace all the features of Google, but it can fit the bill if you just need a basic search of Creative Commons.

an1sotropy 4y ago
Thanks! But just to be clear, it isn’t somehow searching all things under a CC license, but just things within wikimedia right?
- input_sh 4y ago
  Last time I checked, Creative Commons had their own search for things under their licenses. But now apparently that project got transferred to WordPress and is now named Openverse: https://wordpress.org/openverse/?referrer=creativecommons.org https://wordpress.org/openverse/?referrer=creativecommons.or... Anyways, I'd argue that's the most comprehensive database of CC-licensed works.
  - an1sotropy 4y ago
    Thanks for this. Also, I just checked that flickr.com still allows you to filter their searches by license.
freediver 4y ago
This looks great. Care to share the API call used for searhing?
- projproj 4y ago
  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=search&gsrnamespace=6&gsrsearch=<url-encoded https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generat... search term here>&format=json (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query for reference) edit: formatting

eli 4y ago

Unfortunately you can't really be sure that an image with metadata claiming it is CC licensed is actually CC licensed or that the website offering it has the permission of the author. I have been burned by this.

ficiek 4y ago
You can say the same about anything. I am guessing you don't use anything that is open source in any capacity and don't buy any proprietary software and libraries in case they are lying and they can't actually distribute them?
- ghaff 4y ago
  True. Although an additional wrinkle with Creative Commons is that, depending upon how conservative you want to be and how the copyright owner interprets terms like non-commercial and what constitutes appropriate attribution, there are all sorts of variations that may or may not be suitable for a given use. Of course, for many casual purposes it's widely ignored and for photos of people used for advertising and marketing, you need a model release anyway.
- eli 4y ago
  Sure. But this actually happened. I've been twice bitten by using images that claimed to be CC and then an apparent copyright owner appeared and said otherwise. I've never had that happen with open source software. I think copyright trolling is more prevalent with images, and I think it's generally easier to determine the canonical origin of software. But yes, it's absolutely a risk and a reason why many companies have a legal review process before any new libraries can be used.
- gernb 4y ago
  To add what others are saying. I CC-BY all my photos but just because the photo is CC-BY doesn't mean it's safe to use. I don't know all the other "rights" but for example a photo I took of Mickey Mouse, or a movie poster, or a photo I took of some art in a museum may have additional rights issues. Even pictures of buildings https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/known-image-restrictions.html https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/known-image-r... Note: I get that adobe might be wrong here. Whether they are right or wrong on particulars is beside the point. I just linked there because it was clearer than most other search results I found. Here's another https://mymodernmet.com/eiffel-tower-copyright-law/ https://mymodernmet.com/eiffel-tower-copyright-law/

Kalanos 4y ago

did not know this was a feature and i use the advanced filters a lot

tssva 4y ago

I'm a little confused by part of this article. The author states part of the evidence they used for deciding something was wrong is that a search not restricted to Creative Commons licensed images included many images with open source licenses and some in the public domain. If you restrict your search to Creative Commons licensed images why would you expect images under other open source licenses or in the public domain to be returned?

footlose_3815 4y ago

Is there a better creative commons search engine that will only return free media?

macintux 4y ago
The article and comments promote this alternative: https://wordpress.org/openverse/ https://wordpress.org/openverse/
katabasis 4y ago
Wikimedia Commons recently introduced a new MediaSearch feature (everything there is free by definition): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch

shadowgovt 4y ago

The key point here is "... and hardly anyone noticed." In theory, site reliability engineers and software engineers work together at Google to maintain existing functionality and check for regressions. In practice, regression checks can only cover what they've been told to cover, and if breaking a feature doesn't cause a metric to crash, Site Reliability doesn't have the information to know something is wrong. The result is that generally speaking, Google prioritizes existing features by how popular they are (i.e. "Maintenance by Popularity") modulo how much of a stink someone influential can make if they screw it up (i.e. "Maintenance by Twitter."). If almost nobody uses the CC filter (and I bet, in the grand scheme of things, they don't), Google may not have enough signal to know they broke the filter unless someone had the foresight to add a metric to check search results on that query separate from the rest of the search result data (and at Google's scale, you can't just add a metric for free; in addition to eng-hours to build and tune it, the data has to be stored somewhere and teams have finite budgets for space that can only be grown by negotiation with the relevant teams managing the monitoring services or the project as a whole).

Thaxll 4y ago
At some point you reach a complexity level that even the engineers don't even know how it's supposed to work. I mean someone type something on google the result is not what is expected how do you troubleshoot that or know that it's a regression?
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
...or they screw it up, make it worse and worse, and less and less people use it, making it less popular, less chance someone fixes it, less people use it, less chance, less people, less, less, google graveyard. Both google image search and "normal" google search are becoming more and more a pain to use, where you have to use quotemarks on pretty much everything plus a few excludes to find anything at all.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Yep. This is definitely the flip-side of Google's process. It makes some sense; take a step back, and the story is "If Google software engineers don't care enough to make it good, and Google users don't care enough to keep using it in spite of its flaws, why is Google throwing money at it at all?" Google is a weird company because so many priorities are set by software engineers, not managers; some projects die because they literally run out of passionate engineers to work on them and management isn't incentivized to force engineers to work on projects they hate, instead asking the question "If nobody wants to work on this, is it worth it to keep doing it?"

O__________O 4y ago

Creative Commons always felt broken to me. Is anyone able to explain why following is not flawed and not possible, that is: Content thief steals contents anonymously, posts it as Creative Commons content anonymously using free hosting, archives the content on Way Back, and then uses content claiming it is Creative Commons if anyone asks? Basically it is content laundering - and something that impossible for Creative Commons to address as is. (If reasoning is not flawed, also interested in possible solution to the issue.)

dleslie 4y ago
Your scheme would apply for any sort of licensing, permissive or not, and is certainly not constrained to using creative commons. It's also flawed in the same, albeit weak, manner: the source it was stolen from predates the stolen copies, and so can show its true provenance. Of course, if it wasn't published or otherwise registered, no one would know.
bityard 4y ago
> Basically it is content laundering - and something that impossible for Creative Commons to address as is. CC is just a usage license that authors can apply to their works in order to share them freely with the world. It's strange to me that you might think it is the job of CC to police how people (mis)use it?
alt227 4y ago
This is no different from stealing something physical in the real world, and then claiming its yours. Sure some people will believe you and be impressed, but as soon as you attract the attention of the original owner, they will use the law to prove it is not yours but theirs. This is applicable to anything that can be 'owned'. Licensing only dictates how something can be used lawfully, the law protects the license from being abused.

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

I think this is not that there are only three dog pictures because Google broke CC. I think this is more of a Google/ML/etc. "over-helping". If I click on all the other dog pictures bar ("german shepherd, puppy, baby, rottweiler, police", etc. right below the option to select size, color type, time, licenses) additional CC images show up of the selected sub-type. The selection is additive (and) filters. It is more that Google deciding what I really want.

varispeed 4y ago

I stopped using Image Search like a year ago, simply because it is useless. You cannot find anything. Personal anecdote - I was at a specialist doctor to discuss the results of my tests. I was shocked when he typed a health issue to Google Image search, clicked on (what seemed to me) a random table matching his search terms and compared it with my results. He then said that everything is fine, the parameters are normal. That got me scared, what if someone intentionally put a doctored table and used SEO to promote it to the top to mislead doctors and causing bad outcomes to patients?

gwbas1c 4y ago

One thing with any query parameter API like this is that there's no guaranteed signal when the API has breaking changes. I'm going to assume that there are hundreds or thousands of products, tools, hobby projects, ect, that direct to Google searches; none of which have any mechanism to know and break gracefully when the API changes. Furthermore, Google is under no obligation to coordinate with anyone who just arbitrarily send queries their way. (I've had a few hobby projects use Google Queries.) Seems like the most we could really ask is to put some kind of version stamp into the query parameter; and Google could optionally support old parameters or simply return an error. Otherwise, we have to accept that sending browsers to other pages via query parameters is inherently fragile and has a high probability of breaking at any time.

shortformblog 4y ago

I noticed. I use this tool all the time. Now Google just made it useless.

cf141q5325 4y ago

Its not just creative commons images. In case you havent noticed, those billions of search results have max out between page 20 and 40 for a while now.

therealmarv 4y ago

Google Image Search is deteriorating in certain areas for years. Namely: * Reverse Image Search (sometimes no matches although image is for sure out there). I wonder if Reverse Image search sometimes broken because of copyright? * NSFW images (I'm really old enough and I don't need to be protected by Google or anyone else, I think it's a kind of censorship) * And now also Creative Commons as pointed out by Op The best alternative (tested them all) is in my opinion https://yandex.com/images/ https://yandex.com/images/ Chrome extension for reverse image search supporting Yandex https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fast-image-research/epelbghekfokpolcmhhabjgehmplhjgp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fast-image-researc... Android app supporting Yandex for Reverse Image Search https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinkfree.searchbyimage https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thinkfree.... P.S.: I know Yandex is based in Russia, I only use it for specific image searches and I'm happy we have a good alternative based outside of USA... I wished there were more in the World.

Wazako 4y ago
It's amazing how they have destroyed the reverse image search for the last 3/4 years. It's since the switch to ML and the identification of keywords, they don't seem to have image hash search anymore.
neither_color 4y ago
For image search Bing is actually decent, and doesn't serve you webp.
- therealmarv 4y ago
  Bing is second best after Yandex and better than Google sometimes. But Yandex still outperforms in my subjective view especially on Reverse Image search.
jeffbee 4y ago
Hrmm, I tried reverse-searching for the last photo I took - of the USNS John Glenn at the port of Oakland - and both Yandex and Google return similar results, but the Google result returns instantly and Yandex took nearly a minute. What's an example of a search where Yandex does much better?

jrochkind1 4y ago

Does anyone know how Google Image Search (or Bing Image Search[1]) identify images as creative commons or public domain in the first place? If I'm a content provider that wants to maximize the chances that an image search will flag my images as CC or public domain, what should I do? Are there open graph or other meta tags? Or what? [1]: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:license-L1&first=1&tsc=ImageHoverTitle https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:lice...

visarga 4y ago
Probably they have a license classifier trained on thousands of pages that have been manually checked.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

I fear this may be a feature no one at Google is actively caring about anymore. Here's Matt Cutts' tweet about it in 2014: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/422944316458168320 https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/422944316458168320 But I think it dates back to 2009? https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/find-creative-commons-images-with-image.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/find-creative-common...

elashri 4y ago

I am using `kagi` as my search engine. While reading the article I searched `sur:fmc` [0]. The first result was a site that gives information about search urls [1] and gives correct description of what is the function of `sur:fmc`. I couldn't find this page on the first 5 pages on google [2] (and didn't look further). Not to mention google trying to correct me the query text. [0] https://kagi.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc https://kagi.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc [1] https://sites.google.com/a/arps.org/esresearch/images https://sites.google.com/a/arps.org/esresearch/images [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc https://www.google.com/search?q=sur%3Afmc

dmonitor 4y ago
$10/mo is a really hard sell for something I can get for free, but if it's actually useful I would be very tempted
- tylermenezes 4y ago
  Kagi is great! I have to use Google for only about 5% of searches with Kagi, vs about 40% with DDG. I was genuinely surprised
- ravenstine 4y ago
  IMO, it's worth it. People spend that much on Starbucks every day. The key feature I like about Kagi is that being able to downrank or outright block certain domains is built right in. I also like that it doesn't throw a bunch of crap on to the page above the fold and it doesn't pretend that it found results when it finds no matches.
rntksi 4y ago
Guessing "ur" in sur means Usage Rights, and M means Modification, C means Commercial, F means Free (to reuse)?
noidiocyallowed 4y ago
Kagi search? It said something like after I exceeded my daily search limit in the trials: "Go search somewhere else". I mean, who are these snotty kids, that have the audacity to talk down on people? Not gonna spend my money there for sure. Kagi is good, but get a proper PR person and don't let imbeciles ruin the experience.

pGuitar 4y ago

Yandex is better for image search.... specially reverse image search.

itvision 4y ago

Google image search has been broken for at least two years now - looks like Google does not give a damn. I remember it could find 5 to 20 times more pictures than before, you could actually trace images to their sources - this has become impossible. Why? I've no idea. Then they disabled the Google web cache which was hugely useful since it allowed to open dead website/webpages or allowed to browse something when your government restricts access to it. I guess the copyright lobby and China forced the removal of this feature. Google search is still unmatched in terms of being able to find text but other features have seen a huge cut. :-( And don't remind me about iGoogle. I loved it. https://web.archive.org/web/20160314122329/http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/files/fonts_example2.png https://web.archive.org/web/20160314122329/http://linuxfonts...

bacchusracine 4y ago

People still use Google Image search?

Hard_Space 4y ago

I go to Yandex for image search first, these days, especially if I want to do an image-based search. Whatever you may think of it, Yandex uses both facial ID and object recognition, and will return side-results that are both visually and semantically related to the uploaded image. Google Images, on the other hand, seems to look for the nearest monetizable domain cued by the uploaded image, and gives you adjacent results about that. It certainly does no facial recognition, etc. (well, none that it will feed back to you in results, anyway).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lovelearning 4y ago

I have noticed multiple problems in Google search results. But I don't give them any feedback because I don't feel helping Google become better, and therefore more dominant, is the right thing to do long-term.

gernb 4y ago

134k results on flickr https://flickr.com/search/?text=dog&license=2%2C3%2C4%2C5%2C6%2C9 https://flickr.com/search/?text=dog&license=2%2C3%2C4%2C5%2C...

jeffwask 4y ago

Google's ad delivery platform is become a less and less reliable search engine as it's sideline. Support alternate search engines, we used to have a bunch of viable options. Let's get back to that.

dannysullivan 4y ago

I'm with Google Search. I tweeted to the author of the post, but will also share -- this looks to be a bug that we're tracking down. Definitely not what we'd have expected or wanting to have happen for a queries of this nature.

kderbyma 4y ago
Sorry, but it's more than a bug. it's blatant manipulation. you even acknowledge it as much just claim it is to fight extremists, but the truth is you neutered the platform in 2016

katabasis 4y ago

I encourage anyone looking for freely-reusable images to try the new MediaSearch feature on Wikimedia Commons. Also works for other types of media files. All images on Commons are free to reuse but there is also a license filter if you are looking for more specific permissions in terms of attribution, etc. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch

kazinator 4y ago

> Who Locked the CC Dogs Out? Says the person who puts their stuff into Flickr, which requires an account.