Image search engines suck
I use image search engines a lot and thought it would be interesting to monitor what they did with my newly redesigned website over it’s first few months. It’s been very educational. If you’ve ever wondered why you couldn’t find an good picture of something on the internet, it’s not because it isn’t there, it’s because the image search engines suck.
Which search engines are best at getting images? Despite my submitting a sitemap of my website and/or the web address to a bunch of search engines, so far it seems only Google and Bing are indexing the new images. Most of the other search engines such as Yahoo/Alta Vista, Picsearch, and Ask have a selection of photos from my old site, but none of the new stuff. Is either Bing or Google better than the other? That has yet to be seen. I had about 3500 larger photos on my site a couple weeks ago (probably a lot more now). Assuming we go with 3500, we need to double that to account for thumbnail duplicates of photos. That means I have roughly 7000 photos on my site. Bing currently picks up 817 of these. About 180 of these are the larger photos and the rest are thumbnails. So, Bing picks up only about 5% of the larger photos and about 11% of all of the photos. Where Bing slowly adds photos, Google is just damn weird. Google will add a bunch maybe once a month and then slowly drop some almost every day over the course of the month. So, if you hit Google at the right time, they may have a lot more than Bing. Currently they only have 244 photos from my website and only 7 of these aren’t thumbnails. That means they currently have only 0.2% of my larger photos and about 3% of all my photos. These stats may improve over time, but at least as far as photos added to the internet in the last 3 months go, you’ll probably never see 90% of what you are looking for by using an image search engine.
I also did a test by searching for the rare plant Hazardia detonsa using a bunch of different image search engines. As the plant is rare, I figured there wouldn’t be very many photos of it making it fairly easy to compare the search engines. Again Google and Bing came out way above the others. Google and Bing each also yielded a few results the other didn’t. Yahoo/Altavista and Picsearch each managed to find one picture that Google and Bing didn’t pick up. I only managed to find a few more additional photos by looking through the first 20 websites listed on a regular Google search. Of course there were another 4000 possibilities to dig through. So, it seems a combination of Google and Bing is currently the best way to go for an image search. If anyone knows of anything better, let me know.
December 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
One month later… Google went from 244 to 235 of my photos and Bing went from 817 to 989. I’ve probably added about 1000 photos in that time, 2000 if you count the thumbnails. So, they both still suck, but Bing sucks much less than Google.