After detailing the core differences between the search engines, Yandex, Bing, and Google are tested on five test images showing different objects and from various regions of the world. This guide will walk through detailed strategies to use reverse image search in digital investigations, with an eye towards identifying people and locations, along with determining an image’s progeny. Limiting your search process to uploading a photograph in its original form to just may give you useful results for the most obviously stolen or popular images, but for most any sophisticated research project, you need additional sites at your disposal - along with a lot of creativity.

However, if you only use Google for reverse image searching, you will be disappointed more often than not. This method has also seen widespread use in popular culture, perhaps most notably in the MTV show Catfish, which exposes people in online relationships who use stolen photographs on their social media. That’s probably why they asked the question no one else seemed to ask: “Is that really possible?”įinally, let’s find out about Hawaii News Now.Reverse image search is one of the most well-known and easiest digital investigative techniques, with two-click functionality of choosing “Search Google for image” in many web browsers. I like Hawaii News Now for another reason–they are a local news service, so they know a bit about lava fields. We click the link, and we find the quote is good. So a local news outfit has confirmed the photographer did use an accelerant. When we go upstream to that site, we find an addendum on the original article: So we lumber upstream once again, to the PetaPixel site from whence this came. In other words, we still haven’t gotten to the source. In webspeak, “via” means you learned of a story or photo from someone else. So did his shoes catch on fire, or did he set them on fire? I do notice at the bottom of this page though that this is just a retelling of an article published elsewhere it’s not this publication who talked to the photographer! It’s a similar situation to what we saw in an earlier chapter, where the Blaze was simply retelling a story that was investigated by the Daily Dot. He says he wanted to take a picture of himself with his shoes on fire while standing on lava.

Contrary to the headline the photographer doesn’t say lava made his shoes catch on fire. This may be a bit pedantic, but I still don’t know if this was staged. So we read the article down to the bottom:įor this particular shot, Singson says, “Always trying to be creative, I thought it would be pretty cool (hot!) to take a lava pic with my shoes and tripod on fire while photographing lava.” But all good fact-checkers know that headlines lie. Now we could stop here and just read the headline.

Google reverse image search