# Did I imagine this unique image search engine? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 28, 2022, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-i-imagine-this-unique-image-search-engine/975690 "2022-11-28T16:19:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Polarity](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/7cd45c/32.png) [@Polarity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polarity)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2022, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-i-imagine-this-unique-image-search-engine/975690/1 "2022-11-28T16:19:28Z")
I seem to remember many years ago there was a search engine for images. I believe you fed it text and it would pull up a series of images. You then clicked on the image that looked most like the one you were searching for and the process would repeat until you got what you wanted. The weird thing is, I remember this being around the late 2000s, but it doesn’t seem like the technology would have existed to do that in real time. Does such a search engine exist? ---
**Author:** ![Joey\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/919ad9/32.png) [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2022, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-i-imagine-this-unique-image-search-engine/975690/2 "2022-11-28T16:24:01Z")
I don’t remember anything like that, however, Google Image Search might be able to do something similar, but not by design. Maybe Tin Eye, it’s the biggest image search engine I recall being around at the time. Perhaps one of these: > **[Reverse image search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_image_search#Reverse_Image_Search)** > > Reverse image search is a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) query technique that involves providing the CBIR system with a sample image that it will then base its search upon; in terms of information retrieval, the sample image is very useful in its ways. In particular, reverse image search is characterized by a lack of search terms. This effectively removes the need for a user to guess at keywords or terms that may or may not return a correct result. Reverse image search also allows users to ... ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2022, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-i-imagine-this-unique-image-search-engine/975690/3 "2022-11-29T22:18:12Z")
> [@Polarity](#): > > The weird thing is, I remember this being around the late 2000s, but it doesn’t seem like the technology would have existed to do that in real time. That depends on how fancy the algorithm was for determining how similar two images are. By the simplest algorithms, a beigeish face against a black background is very similar to a beigeish vegetable against a black background, but a beigeish face against a black background would be very different from a brown face against a white background. Nowadays, though, nobody working in image processing/recognition/etc would consider such a simplistic algorithm to be at all worth bothering with. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2022, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-i-imagine-this-unique-image-search-engine/975690/4 "2022-11-30T16:19:28Z")
Sounds kind of like AI training a little bit, by way of being a search engine.