Google’s Reverse Image Search Has Become a Visual Shopping Engine

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If you drag an image into Google’s reverse image search, you now arrive at Google Lens. It (often):

  1. identifies an area on your photo that looks like goods for sale and
  2. produces “visual matches” (payment links to such goods) on the right.

People and faces are ignored.

Do you want to dress like your candidate? Use their photo (Someone joked like this on my LinkedIn post).

At times, Google appears to be “creative” (and clueless) in finding goods for sale:

I am all for this way of sourcing things to buy. I like a certain style of clothing and am interested in finding more. It is just please call it a Visual Shopping Engine vs. “visual matches,” to make things transparent.
To be fair, Lens is not always about shopping. Lens will identify architecture, landscape, plants, animals, and a few more things. It is not new but is perhaps better. It can also OCR and translate.

Not that the existing Google’s reverse image is brilliant, but you can return to it either by clicking “find image source” or one of the tools like Chrome extension Search by Image.

Yandex’s Reverse Image search is superior, especially from a Russian IP address. But Yandex has not indexed LinkedIn profiles.

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