Using Google to Find Where an Image Came From
The interwebz is full of luvly pictures.
Sometimes you may want to find out where else a picture that you've found is on the interwebz. For example, say you find an evil hacker dude's picture somewhere and you want to see if that picture shows up on a myspace or facebook page. (of course this purely hypothetical)
How can we find where this lovely picture comes from?
Enter Google image search.
With Google image search we can find the same and/or similar pictures by either uploading the image or by giving Google the URL of the picture.
In our hypothetical case, an evil h4x0r has left us a picture from his web cam.
http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/monsegurwithimac.jpg (ok, ignore the name of the file and PRETEND you don't know who this evil h4x0r is ;) )
So how do we get "evil" Google to find the evil h4x0r?
First we go to the image search page by going to http://google.com and clicking the word "Images" at the top left-hand side, or we can go directly to the Google search URL, http://google.com/imghp .
Once there you will see a little gray camera in the right hand corner of the search input field.
Clicking on the camera brings up a box that says "Search by Image" below the title we have two options, we can either put in the URL of the image (above) or we can upload the image from our computer.
If we paste or type the URL into the box we have to press the search button to make Google do it's thing.
Uploading a file will start the search once the upload is complete.
The result should be other places where that image has shown up.
Practical examples of this technique working are finding a picture of someone on server "out of context" and then using the image search to find out where the image came from originally.
Of course there are other practical examples of how this tool is useful for finding "similar" pictures when you're doing things besides finding evil h4x0rz ;)
Have fun!
Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 June 2012 21:06 Written by DC 406 Webmaster Wednesday, 27 June 2012 12:44