The Decline of Google Image Search (2018 repost)

[Man Mountain]

I don't want to necropost my original thread about this, so I will repost this as I ran into a similar situation today...

(Plus, I want to fix the image links)

For months now, I've been noticing that doing image searches on Google Image Search has become increasingly less reliable. I have lamented this in a number of threads on the forum as I've been noticing this. Here is a WTF moment I had while searching an image the other day.

An ad on LeoList features the following image:

When I ran a search on the image from the LeoList ad, I got the following result:

As you can see, it literally shows up as a "visually similar image" -- now, when I clicked on the "visually similar image" and ran the "search by image" feature on it, I got pages and pages of results! :frusty:

On the other hand, at least that one actually got results. I've seen cases of pics that are obviously stolen from instagram models that return no results. In one case, I recognized a Demi Rose Mawby pic that got no results in an image search until I repeated the search after putting her name in the search bar with the image.

Anyway, be wary, guys. Image searching isn't as reliable as it used to be...

 

[Man Mountain]

Some of the replies from that original thread:

The top image is not from Leolist, it does not have the watermark.

The change might be on LL side not Google.

Did LL watermark become too intrusive, or Leolist did some other non-obvious modifications maybe?

You're right. I took the image from the "visually similar images" version. But the screen cap is the result I got when searching the LeoList hosted version of the image.

I understand the point you're making about the watermark but that was certainly never an issue in the past. And I'm pretty sure I've run into similar issues when searching pics on BP ads in the past few months. I don't surf BP as much though, so I may have to do a bit more research to see if that is indeed an issue.

(If I recall correctly, I think the Demi Rose Mawby pic may have been in a BP ad but I can't be certain at the moment)

Thanks for the note

TinEye got 342 results immediately on an image search.

It searched over 15.795 billion images in 1.1 seconds.

https://www.tineye.com/

 

[Man Mountain]

More from the original thread...

It does indeed look like tineye is back to being a more reliable tool for image searching again... at least when it comes to searching the images from LeoList. The following result of searching this image on Google Image Search:

Searching the same image on tineye, led to 4 results, one being this image on the Chive web site:

Now doing a Google Image Search on that pic and I finally get the kind of result that I used to get by searching the image directly through Google Image Search:

I will reiterate that for a very long time, an added extra watermark or subtle edit to cut off the model's face did not seem to affect the effectiveness of Google Image Searches in the past, so I don't understand why it seems to be having such an effect in recent months.

 

[Man Mountain]

The last post from that original thread...

Okay. I just did a bit of experimenting and I have to give felix' theory a lot more credence. When I recently first saw an edited, watermarked version of the following pic in an ad on LeoList, I thought it was such an obviously pilfered looking image but when I ran a Google Image Search on it, I got no hits. So, tonight I ran it through tineye and got a few results with one being this one on the chive:

I then tried to approximately recreate the edit myself and cut it down to this:

I then did a Google Image Search on this edit and got about three pages of results of escort ads featuring that version of the image. The only real difference being no "LeoList" watermark on it. If you run the same search, you will see a number of the other images from that same ad popping up in those results yet when I searched those images, they also returned no hits in my original searches -- not even for those other ads on other ad site pages. Very, very odd...

Edit to note: Although, I must note that still none of those results were of the unedited version as it appears on The Chive.

 

[Man Mountain]

Today, I noted the following review:

https://perb.cc/vbulletin/showthread.php?251878-Alina-Allure-0655-incredible

in reference to this ad on LeoList:

https://www.leolist.cc/personals/fe...r/vancouver_10_10_vip_elite_brazilian-3505012

In the thread, PoorGuy noted:

The photos look "instagrammed copied", not crisp like an amateur-shot picture.

Based on my own intuition and believing that he was most likely correct, I decided to run Google Image searches on the pics. Pics 1, 3 and 4 got no results. However, while the second image also didn't return any direct results, as in the original post from the thread, the original, non cropped image clearly showed up in the "visually similar images" sub area. Clicking on that image brought up the Google search info about that image including a name: Helin Kenzi

Now when including the name of the instagram model whose images have been stolen for that ad in the search bar for each image being searched, it did result in finding the images on various instagram, twitter and pinterest sites.

Edit: Unfortunately, I'm having trouble uploading or transloading images to post image at the moment for the purposes of providing examples of all of this.

 

[Abbott_]

The Decline of Google Image Search ...

Me thinks they being googled .