The Fever Of Phineas » 2006

Byte Searching August 30, 2006

Posted by admin in : Web Tech , 2comments

I occassionally have good ideas, and the better the idea, the more likely some else already thunk it.

Please tell me if this is a good idea, and whether you know it to have been thunk.

I was trying to find an image on the web. I saw the image, but I wanted to find out whether that same image was already out there, or what its origin might be. I know I can search google images by key word, which I guess looks at file name, or perhaps image tag/link data or other contextual data to support a keyword search. But I had no keywords to go by, so I thought it would make sense to be able to submit the actual image to a search from, and find all instances of web page which hosted that exact same jpg. So it would essentially be searching by the serial data that make up the file rather than human supplied tag data. I know this could be problematic as the same image could exist in many different formats, but it still seems like it would be useful to find exact matches by bytes. This would make as much sense on a local machine as on the internet.

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