My favorite part of the DDG image search is being able to locate and save the original image file without needing to navigate to the website.

Google included this feature until a few years ago where they removed it.

They removed it because photographers and publishers complained about how easy it was for the average person to just take images from the results and use them elsewhere without attribution. The funny thing is, all you need to do now is to right-click on the image and open in a new tab. But based on your change in behavior I guess that little bit of obfuscation was a lot more effective that I thought.

> Google included this feature until a few years ago where they removed it.

I vaguely recall something about a legal settlement. A quick search didn't turn anything up, though.

It was with Getty. http://resourcemagonline.com/2018/02/getty-and-google-reach-...

Fortunately that's not a problem of needing user specific information. I'm sure by hiring the right engineers they can start improving on some of the search algorithms in this arena.

DDG is a Bing frontend.

They don't have budget or staff for building search indexing/ranking like this.

Yandex is pretty good. But where it really got Google beat is in reverse image search.