You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not being sued for discrimination.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/google-qu...

https://theconversation.com/googles-algorithms-discriminate-...

Oh I see. What I'm looking for is the reason why they broke the reverse image search. It was working well many years ago but some time after that they switched it to some strange image classifier (I upload an image of an apple to find exactly the same image to track its license of origin, and it says "possibly an image of an apple" - oh thank you Google I didn't know that.)

Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)

https://tineye.com/

> Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)

Tineye is definitely better than Google with crops, etc. Google reverse image search seems to have more data, but it seems much less able to recognize even basic modifications to the input.

Do they at least tell you the type of Apple it is?

> You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not being sued for discrimination.

Who's suing them and on what grounds? If they made changes, it's probably for PR reasons, not legal ones.

Also not all of these seem "fixed" e.g.:

> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...

Article from 2016, but results look very similar today: https://www.google.com/search?q=unprofessional+hair&source=l...

They used to have in their AI ethics department some of the most anti-AI progressives. They picked on everything - biased training data, discriminatory usage, consuming too much energy to train, models are just stochastic parrots, etc. while forgetting to mention any effort to mitigate the problems (of course these are real concerns and being under intense research) Now these critics are fired, but Google must have learned to fear them.

If they let everyone use the latest models, critics could uncover ugly biases in 10 minutes. Then Google would have to do damage control. These models are very suggestible. You can induce them to make fools of themselves.

IIRC it was mostly from groups like Getty images. They and other image licensing companies didn't want google showing their images in search results. They claimed it was copyright infringement and given the absolute state of IP law in the US they could have made Google's life very difficult.

We're talking about reverse search, right? (Because "normal" image search still kind of works, it's reverse search that is completely broken.) In this case, you already have the copyrighted image, and if you find out that the same image is on Getty Images, then all the better as you can check it license. Also, it's better for GI as it gives them more exposure, and the kind of companies who use GI are very unlikely to pirate images.

Couldn't compliance with a robots.txt file have prevented all of this?

Maybe the view image link removal in 2018.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v...