> Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.
I'm not disputing that, and it certainly explains why it's "good enough" for somes search queries whilst being totally gimpy for others.
My understanding was that Google does prioritise what it's classified as local search results though, on the basis that they're likely to be more relevant.
The TL;DR of it is that google crawls the internet for photos, associates those photos with text content pulled from the caption or from the surrounding page, and gives them a popularity score based on the popularity of the page/image. There are some cleverer bits trying to label objects in the images, but it's primarily a reflection of how frequently that image is accessed and how well the text content on the page matches your query. There's some additional localization, anti-spam, and freshness rating that influences the results too.
The majority of pages with "人" and a photo on it that has a machine labeled person image would be a photo of a japanese/chinese person, and if you're being localized to japan with a vpn, that would be even more true.
Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.