Similar to @Archit’s request for images in news results, are there any plans to expand the image search results? Perhaps with results from Pexels or Unsplash?
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Thanks for the question. We do not have this on a timed roadmap. This is simply that we have a lot on the roadmap now; updated news search, maps, business listings, general release of search ads, plus another announcement to be made soon.
We have some thoughts about how we can and might tackle images, when to comes to it. Still, this is a particular area where we would especially welcome user perspectives, ideas and understanding of needs. What might we do here which you would value and welcome? What gains might we provide over other image search services? What pains do you have with image searches you do on other SEs?
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Good question. I did not think that far ahead. As it is, I find the results good enough for what I do at work; I generally need the occasional stock photo. I sometimes need logos. On rare occasions I would need a picture of a person, the CEO of a company, for example. The latter two I grab from Wikipedia or the company website/press release.
Personal needs are easily met. The pictures that I look for the most are:
- album covers and book covers
- I just go to musicbrainz, discogs, openlibrary, goodreads and get them
- pictures of products that I am interested in
- I try to get them from the website — but if it is an older product, then I might need to search a little harder
There is a lot of repetition on most search engines when it comes to images. It is always a pain to search, then set the size, then hope to find a recent picture.
A plus would be searching for pictures with transparent backgrounds, which SEs do, but it would be great to set default image search options, like we can with regular search, so I can always search for the largest PNG available with a transparent background.
Image search is the least important, for me, compared to the other items on your todo list.
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Heavy +1 on images with transparent backgrounds here; if I were to just be putting forwards things which help me when I come to do some graphic design work (everyone I know seems to be getting married right now and treat my abilities as repayment for favours of yore).
That +
- searching for images by usage rights
- an increased number of sources, with ease of switching between these
- anything that allows me to dodge the webp format when saving
would all supercharge an image search for me, personally.
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It would be helpful if any standardized licensing (like Creative Commons) were shown in the results.
For example, whatever data informs the Creative Commons badges under this image could be indexed.
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I’d really like the ability to change image providers using the UI without Javascript. While I wouldn’t normally ask for this in a service, Mojeek seems to have taken great care to make all site functions accessible even for users who don’t enable Javascript. This seems to be the only exception.
It’s possible to change image providers now just by adding &imgpr=bing to the end of the URL, though.
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i think image search may be underrated in general - i find it can be very valuable
for example i was looking for a specific product (brushless hub motors) and DDG’s image search was more helpful and much faster than visiting a pile of hosts and reading text to see if they had what i wanted
in general i really like the way DDG does it and the filters they have: regions, safe search, time, sizes, colors, types, layouts, licenses
i also like that you can search a domain without using search keywords in order to discover all images for that domain ( site:<domain> )
also DDG adds some descriptive text/context below the thumbnails (rather than having to hover like Startpage does) and that is helpful
other than some CSS tweaks, i don’t readily know how DDG’s image search could be improved upon other than having it obey the ‘-’ operator ( -iDontWantThisInResults ) and double quote operators
as far as being usable without JS, that’s not at all important to me AS LONG AS the code isn’t imported, is secure, is clean, is published, and respects privacy
JS has gotten a very bad rep with the privacy conscious and rightfully so, and it is certainly way overused, however i think it can also be very useful in fundamental ways that makes a site easier to use or to present content in a more intuitive way - if it can be done without JS, great, but there’s no reason to be wary of it as long as certain conditions are met in my opinion
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as far as being usable without JS, that’s not at all important to me AS LONG AS the code isn’t imported, is secure, is clean, is published, and respects privacy
I would certainly prefer if more Javascript was released in this way.
JS has gotten a very bad rep with the privacy conscious and rightfully so, and it is certainly way overused, however i think it can also be very useful in fundamental ways that makes a site easier to use or to present content in a more intuitive way - if it can be done without JS, great, but there’s no reason to be wary of it as long as certain conditions are met in my opinion
I wanted to clarify that the reason I disable Javascript is because I’m thinking about it from a security perspective. Browsers are, for most people, the largest attack surface on their computers. Javascript represents a great deal of that attack surface. The bluntest method of attack, of course, is convincing a user to disable an executable file and run it, but zero-click attacks usually rely on a Javascript payload.
I trust mojeek.com now, but if I enable Javascript for it on uBlock Origin, that effectively means that I am trusting them forever. The less sites I need to do that for, the better, I think.
Additionally, sites are much lighter and load faster without Javascript, which is a nice benefit. I don’t believe Javascript contributes that much to browser fingerprinting, and sites can still do a lot to identify you without Javascript, so I’m not sure if disabling it is even beneficial from a privacy perspective. Naturally, of course, disabling Javascript will allow sites to better fingerprint you. I tend to see fingerprinting as a game that can’t be won, though TOR might be one possible exception.
Because most of what I’m looking at in my browser tends to be static webpages, I often don’t need Javascript.
yes! i just want to second that - this is why i do not recommend using a fork of a browser since security can lag well behind
our browsers our our primary gateway to the www where the vast majority of threat lie and they are extremely complex beasts consisting of many millions of lines of code
that thought crossed in my mind as i was writing my post - we’ve all seen how companies that start out with good intentions grow to become evil (and no, i’m not referring to Google since they were absolutely evil right out of the gate - founded with CIA seed money)
actually fingerprinting relies heavily on JS - if you run a test on any browser fingerprinting site without JS enabled, you’ll see there’s not much data it can acquire without it - try for example…
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let me amend my last comment to say that, if one disables JS globally, entropy is increased since not many people actually do that
still, it is certainly best in my opinion to disable JS globally, then allow only where needed (uBO makes this very easy to do)
in addition to the privacy aspect, JS also presents serious security issues - one may think that the mass distributed libraries are audited meticulously for security holes, however that is not necessarily the case - see A warning to business owners and managers, you are a big part of the problem! and other articles on that site