The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

Ugh Pinterest results.

I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy image search results the way they have.

It's literally never the original source for anything, but you can bet it's most of the first 10 pages of results. Then it doesn't even let you right click to open the image file, and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything. THAT'S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH IT.

And if it is not a pintrest link it is an amp link which is equally bad in my experience. I just want to link a picture. Not a link to a page that might have the picture but might also have the entire article/reddit discussion and not the image which I was searching for.

When I'm reverse image searching something it's often to find the original artist of an illustration, photo, or whatever. I want to know who made it, see their other work, and find it in its original quality without 15 generations of jpg recompression artifacts.

But no, Pinterest has better SEO than the artist does, so it's just endless reposts upon reposts and never the original work.

Occasionally you get lucky and it's not the sort of image that Pinterest users share. Then you might actually find where it came from.

THIS. So much this. Time was when you could actually discover the provenance of an image. Almost every time, when I’m doing a reverse image search, that is my intent. It used to work. It seldom does these days.

Really makes you wonder if the people at google actually use their own product. Anyone who has ever used google image search in the past couple of years will have noticed that it's filled to the brim with garbage results from pinterest.

I'd expect a company like google, who tracks what kind of socks you have on everyday, to also track their own search engine... users mistakingly clicks on pinterest link, user immediatly clicks back, and looks for something else... is it so hard to assume, that they don't want pinterest results, because they're useless, and somehow lower their seo score? Nooo, of course not, just put the pinterest results near the top, until users puts "-pinterest" in the search bar.

And the interesting thing about that is, you'd think it would be (relatively speaking) straightforward for Google to keep track of the first place a given image was indexed (or possibly the first few places, or everywhere it was seen over the first X period of time since you couldn't guarantee the very first would always be the original). Assuming that original was still online, it would seem to be the place to direct searchers to, regardless of pagerank or whatever.

Try using tineye.com. It has noise too, but seems to be easier to find the original source than Google these days, at least for me anyway.

I have fallen in love with Yandex image similarity search (search by providing a query image, not text). You can find so much more with it, it's like Pinterest but without the crap. For example I could find images for my ML model but also furniture ideas for my house and check if my kid is objectively cuter than average (lol, yeah, objectively!).

I find this helps: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/

It puts the "view image" button back.

In my recent experience, Bing, Tineye, and Yandex are all better at finding image sources than Google Images. But who knows how long that will last.