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dessant / search-by-image

Browser extension for reverse image search, available for Chrome, Edge and Safari
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/search-by-image-for-safari/id1544552106
GNU General Public License v3.0
2.28k stars 200 forks source link

Allow users to choose "search select URL" or "search select image" method depending on the site #187

Open ericpa06 opened 2 years ago

ericpa06 commented 2 years ago

First of all, thank you very much for your amazing extension. Second, I don't know how to explain this in a short manner, so I will be a little lengthy on my explanation: image

Search engines can't access data on sites that require some login or authentication or whatever (such as a site behind a hard paywall or something), therefore obviously search engines aren't able to do reverse search on those sites. If you are accessing some site behind a hard paywall, and you try to reverse search some image on Google, you just end up with a result like this, saying that that image isn't publicly available.

image

"Search by Image" deals with this by offering an option that automatically downloads the image and then uploads it on that given search engine you are using it. The thing is that this is slightly slower than straight out submitting the URLs to that given search engine, it takes a few seconds more, and if you are dealing with a bigger image and have a bad internet connection, it may take sometime, it is not as fast as directly submitting the URL to the search engine .

So I was wondering, it would be interesting if you could choose what sites you want to use each search method. Something like "the default action I choose is "search select URL" (because in most sites I use that option will work just fine), but for these sites here, which are behind a paywall, I want the extension to use the "search select Image" mode, which is slightly slower, but it will work no matter what, even if Google/Yandex/Bing/etc can't access that site.

Just a humble suggestion. Again, thank you very much for your extension.

ericpa06 commented 2 years ago

Just one thing I was thinking : a possible approach could be some option like "try search by URL" first as a rule, if that URL can't be accessible by search engines cause is behind some paywall, then upload the image (as well as adding that particular domain on a list, so that previous reverse searches from that given domain would already automatically default to the desired action, there is to say, to automatically default to "search image" mode). Something like this maybe:

image