Friday, August 4, 2023

Brave Search for Images and Video

Brave (via Hacker News):

Brave Search is releasing its own privacy-preserving image and video search that is independent from Big Tech search engines. Users will no longer need to leave Brave Search for image and video search results. Now any Brave Search query can be served directly from Brave’s own index, enabling users to benefit from a fully independent search engine that protects their privacy and is censorship-resistant. Our recently released Brave Search API will also imminently include these image/video results.

My initial impression is that the image search finds fewer and less relevant matches than other search engines, but it’s good to see them working on this.

Previously:

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And bring reverse image search!


Yandex has the best image search BY FAR. It searches exactly what I'm looking for. Reverse image search almost always finds images that are very, very close to the input and often the exact same image at different sizes. And then when you click an image in the results, it automatically shows related images of THAT image. If you search for an image that has a person's face, it will often find completely different photos featuring the same person, even if their face is at a different angle, totally different environment, photos separated by many years, etc.

Compare to Google reverse image search which often has zero results, almost never finds different images of the same person (unless they're a famous globally known person such as an actor or politician), and often focuses not on the subject of the image but irrelevant details like what kind of jewelry or shirt they're wearing. Bing is about the same.

I have noticed recently that Google image search is slightly better, because at some point this year (I think?) they added a "Find Image Source" button in the results. So even when there are "zero results", the "Find Image Source" will often show the same or very closely related images (what a bizarre way to hide relevant results). But for years before this button was added, Google image search mostly gave irrelevant links to shopping sites where you could buy similar clothes or whatever the person has on in the photo.


Old Unix Geek

@BenG : agreed, yandex is great for pictures.

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