Google Search by Image API? - google-image-search

for my job, I'm looking into an idea in which people would use Google Search by Image and use any celebrity photo they find. Google would return the results and then on our end, a there'd be a database of professionals showing how to get that specific look.
I'm assuming this is extremely unlikely to do, based on that users could use ANY photo.
So, is there a way that I could have about 100 or so celebrity photos that Google Image results could compare to and then choose the one that is closest.
Basically:
Drag drop photo of Britney Spears
Google searches with that image
Google's results compare the top images with our 100, and selects the closest match.
User gets to see video of how to get Britney Spears look.
I'm not a programmer, but looking for some API or Search by Image extension that could make this remotely possible for the programmers here at my job. Does something like that (a search by image api) exist? The best I could find was just the support page, which is hardly of any help: http://support.google.com/images/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=searchbyimagepage&answer=1325808

You can easily search by an existing image by inserting this into your address bar:
https://www.google.com/searchbyimage?site=search&sa=X&image_url=YOUR_IMAGE_URL
Example:
https://www.google.com/searchbyimage?site=search&sa=X&image_url=http://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/stackoverflow/company/img/logos/so/so-icon.png

Sorry to say, but the Google image API is deprecated:
Important: The Google Image Search API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. It will continue to work as per our deprecation policy, but the number of requests you may make per day may be limited.
Quite sure there are some alternatives (http://www.tineye.com/ and http://mrisa.mage.me.uk)
Update (2013): There is now Google Custom Search which allows image searches.

These answers are quite obsolete, but the question comes up in searches. So, the Google Vision API has the "web detection" feature that does a reverse image search. First 1000 requests per month are free, $3.50/1000 afterwards.

I think Google Web Detection could be a solution for you. Google moved it permanently from Image search

You can do it via www.images.google.com but only from a browser (lets you upload your own image and compares it to similar).
I'm working on doing it from code (not from browser).

I had the same problem and came up with two solutions:
There are a number of APIs that give reverse image search results nowadays. The ones I used are https://reverseimageapi.com and TinEye.com.
As the selected answer mentions, you can easily scrape this information but will almost certainly need rotating proxies to prevent being banned by the search engine. There are plenty of proxy rotation services (Zyte, Oxylabs, ScrapingBee, etc.) to make you life easier.
I ended up going with option 1 due to the upkeep of scraping search engines and elements changing / breaking.

Related

Does Office 365 image search work? If so, how?

According to Microsoft ("Image Analysis" in https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Enrich-your-SharePoint-Content-with-Intelligence-and-Automation/ba-p/194174, from May 21, 2018), we should be able to search for text within images.
Is this working for you/anyone? If so, I would like to know what you had to do to get it to work.
I have a SharePoint modern team site with PNG images that contain clearly readable text...but search will not find anything. I have requested re-indexing.
I have had a Microsoft Support request (#10638094) open since June 27 with this question/issue, and no one--even after escalation--has been able to answer it.
Based on the article above, it appears that "MediaService" column(s) should be added to the library to support this; however, I can find no such columns in the environment (using PnP export to review).
Naomi Moneypenny and Kathrine Hammervold highlighted this functionality at Ignite 2017 (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/Microsoft-Ignite-Orlando-2017/BRK2181, about 27:00), but it doesn't seem to be available/working (at least not for me).
August 24: So, after research, digging yet further, I have an escalated support ticket at Microsoft (#10638094, unsolved) and there are conversations at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Intelligent-Search-Discovery/Search-for-words-in-your-images-in-Office-365/ba-p/135703, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Enrich-your-SharePoint-Content-with-Intelligence-and-Automation/bc-p/236625, and Does Office 365 image search work? If so, how?. I have yet to hear of this functionality working for anyone. I will keep digging, and I will certainly post if I hear anything. J
After some digging, from official it seems already released at the end of 2017. However there is no any related doc or official guide to this Text in image search function.
The 2 way i can think of perform text in image search.
Perform OCR yourself on the image before uploading the image and embed the text in image metadata.
Use support image type like IIRC and TIF that image are recognized.
In your case, you can upload the image and have another column that contains text and apply metadata to the image in a list/ library column.
OneDrive in another hand also has this function. For example, search for things like "cat" and it * should* pull up most pictures you have of cats. Its more likely using tag as label for the image instead of reading the picture it self.
Also, i believe OneNote has its index recognizable text and handwriting. Maybe this can point you to the right directions.
*Microsoft Azure's computer Vision offer service to recognized text in image. Maybe this can help.
"Is this working for you/anyone?" Yes, I responded to this post elsewhere and see it posted here, as well. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you HOW to get it to work or to verify that it is correctly configured. I can only suggest a test for you to see if it is working for you, as it works for me. I have not tested every way in which it could or should work. I have only discovered it working with PNGs I inserted into Wiki Pages in SharePoint Online. Those PNGs are generated using Snag-It to take Screen Captures and I do not see where Snag-It would be doing any OCR on the image to embed anything, etc. OCR is not even in the Snag-It help file, so I believe the PNG files are just simple PNGs. I insert them into the SharePoint Wiki page, which uploads them to the Site Assets library. And, when I search for a word in the image, the image is returned as a result - not the Wiki page. So, suggest you try a simple test of just inserting a PNG with text in it into a Wiki Page and give the index a bit of time to run to see if it works for you.
It seems like the functionality has matured recently. I have been testing it more thoroughly, and I have documented the results in my blog at http://www.collaboration-foundry.com/SharePointImageAnalysis.
Bottom line: It works for me in OneDrive and SharePoint (modern and classis), but I've only seen it work on the out-of-the-box Document content type--which limits custom solutions somewhat.
It's cool functionality when it works. Looking forward to seeing Microsoft build on this.
John

Google Docs: Table of content page numbers

we are currently building an application on the google cloud platform, which generates reports in Google Doc. For them, it is really important to have a table of content ... with page numbers. I know this is a feature request since a few years and there are add-ons (Paragraph Styles +, which didn't work for us) that provide this solution, butt we are considering to build this ourselves. if anybody has a suggestion on how we could start with this, it would be a great help!
thanks,
Best bet is to file a feature request on the product forums.
Currently the only way to do that level of manipulation of a doc to provide a custom TOC is to use Apps Script. It provides access to the document structure sufficient enough to build and insert a basic table of contents, but I'm not sure there's enough to do paging correctly (unless you force a page break on ever page...) There's no method to answer the question of "what page is this element on?"
Hacks like writing to a DOCX and converting don't work because TOCs are recognized for what they and show up without page numbers.
Of course you could write a DOCX or PDF with the TOC as you'd like and upload as a blob rather than as a Google Doc. They can still be viewed in Drive and such.

can you have "variables" in text in google sites?

Sorry, this is a bad question. I don't even know what the title should be. I'm a total noob at making websites so this might be easy to find but I just don't know the terminology to search for. I cannot find anything about how to do this...
What I want to do is have something like references/variables that I can use in a block of text and it will automatically get replaced with whatever value should be there. Best way I can think of to describe it would be if I was using the site as a design doc for a game or something, I would be able to type in [Title] or something similar on any page and when it loads that text would be replaced with whatever my Title is. That way If I ever change titles, names, classes, races, places, items, etc... they would only have to be changed in 1 place and the change would be reflected everywhere.
I notice if I add a link to a page it will automatically use the Title of that page as the text of the link. That is almost exactly what I want. Except when I change the Title of the other page the text of the link remains as the original text. It doesn't get updated to the new Title and that is not at all what I want.
Also, I want to do this in Google Sites and as simply as possible. I don't really want to use a database. I was hoping Google Sites would have some kind of funcionality for this.
I don't believe this is possible (on Google Sites) and likely you need to consider a hosted solution.
Quoting the answer from this relevant post:
You should consider hosting your solution using Google's App Engine
instead of Google Sites. You can set it up so it uses PHP (see link
below), you can configure it to use your domain name and you get
enough CPU, disk and bandwidth allowance to serve around five million
page views for free each month, if you are serving more than that,
their prices are extremely competitive.
Google App Engine:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html How
to setup PHP using Google App Engine: http://blog.caucho.com/?p=187
Also I'm not sure how your PHP skills are but if you're unfamiliar with it then this should help to get you started.

How does google return "searches" from other websites?

Let's say I'm performing a google search for search term.
Sometimes, one of the suggestions will be to a URL like this: www.someothersearch.com/search+term/
How does "someothersearch.com" do this?
In general, a page will only be in Google if some other page links to it. Google is not going to go to someothersearch.com and submit "search term" into the form, it is likely a hidden or nonhidden link on someothesearch.com.
Why not? someothersearch.com presumably has its own index pages for terms searched previously; the Google spider is just indexing those index pages as well.
Just a guess. Maybe these sites support OpenSearch?
I misunderstood your question at first; What these sites are doing is rewriting their requests. How they know which terms people will search for is a bit of a mystery to me, but it probably relies on things like watching google.com/trends, scraping their own and other log files for referral from google that include the search term, buying lists of well ranking terms people might use AdSense for and instead trying to generate natural traffic for them... etc. Probably when they add new pages with these terms they're also adding them to their xml sitemap that Google will crawl.
Redacted:
I have added the Open-Search tag to your question; please follow it. You'll find this post on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20830/firefox-and-ie7-users-here-is-your-stackoverflow-search-pluginlink textthe most informative; however I recommend you use image/png for your icon format.

How to get a description of a URL

I have a list of URLs and am trying to collect their "descriptions." By description I mean what comes up, for example, if you Googled the link. For example, http://stackoverflow.com">Google: http://stackoverflow.com shows the description as
A language-independent collaboratively
edited question and answer site for
programmers. Questions and answers
displayed by user votes and tags.
This the data I'm trying to accumulate for the URLs I have.
I tried parsing the URL's meta-descriptions, however most of them are lacking a meta-description (yet Google and other search engines manage to get a description somehow).
Any ideas? Should I just "google" each link and scrape the data? I have a feeling Google wouldn't like this...
Thanks guys.
Different search engines have different algorithms to get the description out of the page if/when they are lacking the description meta tag. Some ignore the tag even it it's there.
If you want the description Google has, the most accurate way to get it would be to scrape it. Otherwise, you could write your own or look around on the web for code that does it.
These are called snippets.
Google use proprietary (and possibly patented) methods to garner this information, so there is no simple answer.
As you suggest, they will use meta-description information if it is there. (How to set the meta-information to help Google.)
They will also honour requests from the page authors to NOT include snippets. (How to prevent Google from displaying snippets) You should probably respect this too (as well as robots.txt, of course.)
You may have some luck with existing auto-summary packages, such as OTS.
You may want to check AboutUs.org (i.e. http://www.aboutus.org/StackOverflow.com).
But, there's little chance that the site will have an aboutus page and not have a meta description.
Some info that might explain how google does this:
Webmasters/Site owners Help
Adding a URL to google
I am not familiar with Google APIs, but perhaps there is an official way to get such information.
Interesting. some sources are better than others.
For "audiotuts.com" google has a worse description than AboutUs.com.
Google
Nov 18th in General by Joel Falconer ·
1. Recently, an AUDIOTUTS reader asked me about creative process. While this
is a topic that can’t be made into a
...
AboutUs.com:
AUDIOTUTS is a blog/tutorial site for
musicians, producers and audio
junkies! It is the sister site of the
popular PSDTUTS, VECTORTUTS and
NETTUTS.
I hate problems like these... they should be trivial but they aren't!
If you can assume English content, you can first look for Meta Description, and if that doesn't work, you can look for the first two or three sentence-like word sequences.
A product I worked on looked for the first P or DIV that contained more than one sequence of > n "words" delimited by periods. It would use the two or three sentence-like sequences, up to x total words, as a summary paragraph. It wasn't 100% accurate, but good enough for the average case. The number of words was adjusted a few times to eliminate things like navigation elements.

Resources