Sometime when nobody was looking Google launched reverse image search.

I made a prediction 5 years ago that by 2020, 35% of all Internet searches would be reverse image searches--nobody believed me.

3 years after Forbes wrote that Kerosene and a Match was the future of search: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/20/kerosene-and-match-entrepreneurs-technology-promising.html

Tineye, the current champion of reverse image searches hopefully is involved, but unlikely. They are a necessary plugin for any browser.

http://www.tineye.com/

Tineye is surprisingly bad at reverse image search. It fails half the time for me.

I love reverse image search, so I was excited when Lucas found the src-img bookmarklet.

That bookmarklet turns out to have some nasty problems in Chrome.

So I uninstalled src-img up 6 months ago, moving to Google Reverse Image Search.

I've found Google Image Search to be much much better in most cases.

I use it every day.

Tineye fails for me on size of content. Google reverse-image search until recently was non-existent. You required words to search for images. Tineye was the first global reverse image search portal where you could use images to search for other images, though limited to similarity.

Google image, once you put in a textual search term, could look for similar images using colors and patterns, but it was only recently that you could click on the camera and upload and image to search against.

Tineye still has the upper hand as they have a right-click plugin for random images on random web pages. Google does not.

Just to be clear, I use google image search every day too. But using an image to search versus using text words to search for images are two very different user tasks.

Lately I've been using Google's own Search By Image Chrome Extension.

Unlike the ?¿src-img bookmarklet, it does not blindly load jQuery and break the javascript functionality on tons of pages across the web (including Tumblr).

You just right-click, select Search Google with this image, and you're off to the races!

That Search By Image Chrome Extension is fantastic. Thank you Lucas!

And Greg, I do love dragging an image into Google Image Search. It's so satisfying!

Nice! If they ever create noscript and adblock for Chrome, I'll switch completely! Right now I use Chrome for my app dev and atlassian, firefox for news and IE for exploring or finicky apps.

I don't use noscript, but I love the AdBlock extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb

Greg did you say you use IE but not Safari?

Oh, one more thing: Google "Visually Similar Images" sometimes fails... (NSFW)