
New search-by-image method on Bing.com - rhema
http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2018/09/new-search-by-image-method-on-bingcom.html
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tinkerteller
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.

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kibwen
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
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.

~~~
was_boring
I've been using DDG for a few years now as my primary search engine. I would
say 99% of the time I can find what I need (just like with Google), and it's
super useful with some of their integrations into stack overflow and related
sites.

Regarding the results, after a few years, I found that it's not that DDG is
worse then Google -- but it's that I was conditioned on how to optimize
Google's results. I believe it's because no search engine uses natural
language, instead it's language that we think is natural but our brains have
optimized for the engine.

Once I came to that realization, I started optimizing my search for DDG just
as I had done for Google.

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eugeniub
I often type a programming error message into DDG, fail to find anything
useful, type it in Google, find it right away. I don't see how reoptimizing my
brain would help in this situation where I'm just typing in an error word-for-
word.

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sebazzz
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.

~~~
chii
> 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
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-...](https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-
fun-part-3-deep-learning-and-convolutional-neural-networks-f40359318721)

~~~
archgoon
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.

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js2
Geez, I didn’t realize Google and Bing had search by image. I’m still using
tineye.

~~~
dessant
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)

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e_ameisen
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-
effecti...](https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable-
effectiveness-of-deep-learning-representations-4ce83fc663cf)

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therealmarv
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!

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natch
Not new. But yes useful when needed.

~~~
EE84M3i
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
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
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-
uns...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-unsung-tax-
agent-who-put-a-face-on-the-silk-road.html)

~~~
natch
Thanks.

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

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anentropic
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

