A Comparison of Bing, Google, and Yandex Reverse Image Search Engines ⇥ bellingcat.com

Aric Toler, Bellingcat:

The first and most important piece of advice on this topic cannot be stressed enough: Google reverse image search isn’t very good.

As of this guide’s publication date, the undisputed leader of reverse image search is the Russian site Yandex. After Yandex, the runners-up are Microsoft’s Bing and Google. A fourth service that could also be used in investigations is TinEye, but this site specializes in intellectual property violations and looks for exact duplicates of images.

Toler isn’t kidding around. In these comparisons, it isn’t even a close call between Yandex and any other reverse image search engine. Google even failed to identify an image from Google Street View.

It makes me wonder why Google’s search engine is so comparatively bad. It isn’t like they don’t do facial recognition or object identification; they frequently promote their abilities in both. How are they so far behind when it comes to indexing the web’s photos?