IIRC this was due to a lost court case:

> Almost two years ago, Getty Images filed antitrust charges against Google in the EU, taking issue with the company's image scraping techniques to display image search results. Earlier this week, Google and Getty Images announced a partnership and Getty withdrew its charges against Google. Changes like the removal of direct image links were apparently part of the agreement.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

Meanwhile, the browser feature right click -> "View Image" still works for me on Firefox, as a replacement.

That only gets you the scaled down preview image. I have a Firefox extension that restores the "view original" button.

Have you tried Bing's image search [1]? It's actually pretty great. Bigger previews, much better similarity navigation, easy access to image link, etc.

[1] https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vija+Celmins

yandex also seems pretty good.

DuckDuckGo is what I use for image search, it works about the same as Google did pre-change.

I second this, especially for similar photos.

DuckDuckGo image search, too

I believe the decision to remove that was forced on them by a lawsuit

The following HN thread has more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16388833

Quora and Pinterest are freaking poison, I don't like how often those things show up.

It just wastes my time when I'm looking for something.

FYI you can (for now) get the "View image" button back with this extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-image/

Here's a Chrome version too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

Image search in DDG still has the source images.

Google images returns relatively in-specific and poor results. I have turned to using Yandex. They seem to be better at training their AI as to what is actualy in the images.

Google has basically given up on their image search product. For that matter, their main search product is getting product long in the tooth. It's in the position Microsoft was in during the old days of IE6. Yandex is a good option. Bing is another. I usually prefix my google searches with a domain these days. Instead of merely subtracting a domain, I fix it to a domain I know is good.

Google's IE6 search product needs its corresponding Firefox to give it a kick in the shorts.

Maybe I am missing something but I can get the image URL by right clicking>open image in new tab. This might not matter much to others but I hated them when they recently removed the option to filter image search results by exact dimensions.

Pinterest should just be blacklisted from Google altogether.