where’d that come from?
So I have trained myself to start storing things that I find on the web for future use–who knows when they will disappear. But there’s one important issue: I can’t find out where it’s from if I only have my local copy. So how about a reverse search engine?
For instance, if I could put an image file, rather than a term, into google to find out where it was currently on the web. Or similarly, if I could upload a PDF, or word doc, or the like, and find documents similar to it. I suspect some of these features may be supported in google desktop (just downloaded the mac version this week) but as far as I know, nobody will let me search for an image or sound file and tell me where on the web that file lives.
brad said,
May 12, 2007 @ 1:50 am
I think this is a really cool idea.
It could also be used to detect copyright infringement. If google could “reverse search” an image I created, I would know who was using or storing my image without my permission.
However, I wonder how this would affect generated pages. That is, if I was searching a header file that was on every page of a php-based site, which pages would be relevant to my initial search? What about applying the boolean search rules to this for a more complex reverse search?
Oh! I was going to suggest something that would combine this idea with Dr. Wang’s ALIPR project. That is, submit an image and similar images are displayed or perhaps related pages. But, it appears this feature is already a part of Dr. Wang’s project. Cool stuff.