I just used Google Image search and in frustration switched to DDG because I have no idea how to get direct links to the images that Google presents. I don't think it was always this hard? Or maybe I've grown dumber.

EDIT: Evidently you can right-click and view image. I thought that wouldn't get me to the original image since the image as presented in search is smaller in resolution than what Google says the image really is. Either way, in DDG the image actually links to the damn image and not to the site where the image supposedly maybe appears on.

There is a Chrome/Firefox/Userscript extension that brings back the View Image button:

https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage

You know what DDG is doing is illegal, right? Google Images used to link to direct images as well. But then there were lawsuit threats and a settlement with Getty, which forced them to stop linking directly.

If DDG / Bing become big enough, they too will be forced to stop their practice.

It's not illegal. They were sued then Getty dropped the suit when Google agreed to partner with them and remove the links.

https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...

Lawsuit threats don't make something illegal.

The case with linking is far from settled.

Legal or not, I don't care though. But I do look forward to highly anonymized p2p networks with useful services and software we can rely on by the time the lawmakers have made the internet useless.

Interesting! These makes me remember the documentary/movie “Bananas!” which was about the criminal behaviour of the fruit- and vegetable company Dole. During the making the Americans involved in the making got so scared of being sued their house from them that they left the project. The swedes never cared about the threats from Dole. This also made the news on Sweden that even parliament members backed the project and said that Doles threats where so unethical.

Having said that, I think Goggle is just hiding behind the lawsuit threats.

There's a chrome extension that restores the view image button.

It is already better for video search. I don't remember Google video search being that good.

I've noticed a steep drop in the quality of results I receive from Google without the extensive use of search operators. Especially for politicized topics, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the search engine for access to a more diverse and useful spread of results. This has become such an issue that I've moved over to searx.me (meta-search engine) for the majority of my searches. While there are some edge cases where I have to move over to google (mostly image search), I feel like the results I receive from it are broadly superior to the ones I'm receiving from Google alone.

It’s even more funny since google got worse intentionally. It’s one thing to go IBM and just get slowly bad through attrition and attenuation. A whole different level of curiousity to cuck yourself.

I hope they wise up and improve as I actually would rather have 2-3 highly competitive search companies rather than just 1.

I use Bing whenever I want to find "pirate" sites.

This is already frequently true depending on what you're looking for.

They probably do this the way Google usually does, some sort of probability of similarity. They don't know for sure if a picture is pornographic, or a piece of audio is fair use. Once they reach acceptable accuracy, in their calculus....

A lot of stuff falls into grey areas both for AI classification and human opinion. Let's not forget that humans disagree widely over what's pornographic and what's fair use. Let's not pretend there's a canonical oracle of pornography or (apart from court rulings) what's fair use. It stinks when their AI is clearly wrong or when you disagree with their AI, but it's hard to fault them for setting some accuracy goal when they're trying to hit a fuzzy target anyway.

Maybe your complaint is really that their appeals process is too opaque or difficult. There I agree, but I don't fault them for stopping short of perfect on their AI classifiers.