787875 - Quick access to "Google search by image" is needed

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement, P5)

Description

[t8av]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Build ID: 20120824154833

Steps to reproduce:

I was looking at an image in a website, and trying to find a similar picture over the net.



Actual results:

I used this link to enter the picture URL to find a similar image:
http://www.google.com/imghp?sbi=1



Expected results:

Firefox should support a quick access to find similar pictures of a given image:

1. View any image in the browser.
2. Right click the image and choose "Search by image".
3.  In a new tab a search window will open.

Examples of URL's you can get when entering an image path such as:
http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/shiretoko/firefoxIcon/firefox-512-noshadow.png
To:
http://www.google.com/imghp?sbi=1

Comment 1

[Loic]

There are some add-ons for that. In addition, not all the search engines provide image searching (search engine displayed in the context menu is connected to the current search engine set in the search bar).

Comment 2

[t8av]

I guess that for the present, Google is the only serious "Search by image" service. In the future maybe other search engines will add this feature.

Which add-ons provide this feature? I do not know any. It should be part of the browser.....

Comment 3

[Loic]

About Google Images:
Google Search by Image 0.3: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-search-by-image/
Google Reverse Image Search 0.5: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/google-reverse-image-search/
Search by Image for Google 1.2.0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesearch-by-image/

And you should use Tineye, it's a famous: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tineye-reverse-image-search/

Comment 4

[t8av]

Tineye was the first service of this kind, but their images database is far too small and not updated so they are a bit useless compared to Google.

I think that the menu that appears when right-clicking an image should be user-defined, so everybody is happy. If X=path to the image, then the user can define and URL that contains X.

Comment 5

[u428464]

I think it could be interesting for the new search projects for Firefox.

Comment 6

[search.by.image.extension]

Hi everyone,
    I work for the Google Search by Image team, and we are also interested in adding our feature as a right-click option to the Firefox context menu. We know that there are at least three websites that provide such a reverse image search service: TinEye, Google, and Baidu. Adding such an option would create utility for users who are interested to know more about any image on the web.
    Jared suggested to me that we need to consider standardized API (on the vendor side) and Open Search API (on the browser side). Here's the information I've gathered.

As far as I know, There is no standardized API for this kind of reverse image search feature. We know that currently there are three websites that provide such a service: TinEye, Google (us), and Baidu. I know how Google Search by Image works, but for TineEye and Baidu, I can only venture a guess.
    For example, assuming that we are interested in an image on the web with the following URL:
http://www.theplace2.ru/archive/transformers_2/img/Transformers_2_Reven-9.jpg. Plug this into each of the services gives the following result:


TinEye
http://tineye.com/search/fbb16280130adeefc8c5626becffa3eecef6e47e/

Google
http://www.google.com/searchbyimage?image_url=http://www.theplace2.ru/archive/transformers_2/img/Transformers_2_Reven-9.jpg

Baidu ShiTu
http://stu.baidu.com/i?objurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theplace2.ru%2Farchive%2Ftransformers_2%2Fimg%2FTransformers_2_Reven-9.jpg&filename=&rt=0&rn=10&ftn=searchpcstu&ct=1&stt=0&tn=baiduimagepc&tab=0&oritn=face&pn=0&oritn=face


Both Google and Baidu use GET requests with their respective domain names and two special sets of cgi parameters:
"searchbyimage?image_url=" for Google, and
"i?objurl=...&rt=0&rn=10&ftn=searchpcstu&ct=1&tn=baiduimagepc" for Baidu.

However, TinEye seems to use a POST request for even URLs that's pasted to their search box.
I am not sure if they ever use GET, but if they do, then the suggestion from [e-mail] about using X=path could potentially work.

Also, after talking to some Chrome folks, it seems that Open Search API does not already support this feature, so we would need to add it for other search providers if they are going to support this in the future; though there does not seem to be any on the horizon. If you have any suggestion or initial thoughts about this API, we would love to hear them.


Thanks
Howard

Comment 7

[search.by.image.extension]

Oh, by the way, the official Google Search by Image extension for Firefox is at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/search-by-image-by-google/

Thanks
Howard

Comment 8

[search.by.image.extension]

Hi everyone,
   I was wondering if there is any update on this feature request. What would be a good way to follow up on this? Are there any other channels besides this forum. We'd appreciate if someone could give us as some suggestion. Thanks!

Best Regards
Howard

Comment 9

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Hi Howard,

I would suggest that you propose an extension to the Open Search API. You can send that as an email to the firefox-dev mailing list[1]. As you may expect, any help implementing the API extension would be greatly appreciated.

If the API proposal is accepted and implemented, then there shouldn't be too much more work to add the necessary hooks into our context menus.

[1] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev

Comment 10

[search.by.image.extension]

Hi Jared,
   Thank you very much for your suggestion. I will start looking into proposing an extension to the Open Search API.

Best Regards
Howard

Comment 11

[t8av]

Image search should be available also from: Tools->Page info->Media when choosing an image and right-clicking it.

Comment 12

[t8av]

Firefox image search add-on works fine.

I guess that this feature should be built-in in Firefox, but its up to Firefox developers to decide whether to implement it internally or not.

If nobody else asked for this feature to be built-in, then, as far as I am concerned, you can close this bug.

Comment 16

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

I don't think we are going to work on it and some extensions are providing this feature
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-reverse-search/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tineye-reverse-image-search/