Google adds one-click Image Search to Chrome desktop and app
When I came to work today, Chrome was closed and not running, which is a fairly odd occurrence on my work machine. I launched it again and was greeted with a new image search feature that has proven pretty neat and captured much of my morning.
Chrome also reportedly squashed 50 bugs in the latest desktop browser update and paid out a lot of bounty money to people who found the bugs.
My initial thought was that the image search might be a useful tool for hunting down the origination of a meme, but I was being lazy and decided to just Google Image Search something I created that also happened to be on the front page of Pocketables at the moment – the image of the Android overflowing with root applications.
Two clicks on lead me to this application using my image as their app’s logo (don’t install it, the permissions are absurd), and this website using it for one of its articles.
This is not a huge deal (unless I was the lawyering kind, or if Pocketables wanted to make a scene), but this puts into the hands of the casual content creator tools to easily locate where their image is being used, and add a new level of non-anonymity to random sites lifting other people’s work without credit – not that you couldn’t do this before by going to the Google Image Search web page, pressing the photo button, and pasting a link to the picture or uploading and checking each photo. Still, having the ability to go to your site and tap each individual image on it and see if anyone else is using it is a pretty sweet blogger or photographer tool.
Image Search has been enabled the beta channels for Android and the desktop. On Android, by long-pressing any image, you will see a context menu pop up with the option to search Google for this image. On desktops, it’s right click and image search.
Now if Google would just add a feature in images to search for the oldest occurrences of a photo in the images database, so we could locate the origination point, Image Search would be significantly more useful.
