I’m very proud that a photo that I snapped with my cellphone on a London sidewalk (and that I posted in this blog) is the fourth hit you get when you do a Google image search for “comb over”.

Now TinEye lets me feed in the photo’s URL and see the other places where it’s been used. You can even give upload the photo itself. TinEye spiders the Web, creating a hash for the images it finds, and then compares the search “term” to the hash. Of course this can be used to track down Violators, but it could also be useful to get more information about an image. The site’s “cool searches” page has some examples of searches that are, well, somewhat cool and that give a sense of the search engine’s tolerance for variations. (Thanks to Michael O’Conner Clarke for the link.)

[Tags: search images combovers ]

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Here’s an odd thing.

I was sure that when Google China first started cleansing its results, a search for “tiananmen” at Google Images did not return the famous photo of the man standing in front of the line of tanks, or other photos of the Tiananmen demonstrations.

Today it does.

Even odder, I was talking with Lokman Tsui of the Berkman Center about this, and he discovered that if you search for “tiananmen” using the Chinese characters (天安门), you don’t get back photos of the demonstrations but sanitized, post-card-ish touristy photos.

On purpose? Fluke? A crack in the structure of control?

[Tags: china google tiananmen oni filtering lokman_tsui search berkman ]

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YaCy is a peer-to-peer, open source Web search engine. You can use it to create a search portal, but the officially Very Cool thing about it is that you can peer it up with other Yacy installations, creating a distributed, p2p search engine.

[Tags: search p2p open_source everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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