Sunday, December 26, 2021

What Fresh Hell Is This?

So, right now, as I'm trying to find a book-cover image for the post I'm writing, I discovered that Google image search, within the Chrome contextual menu, has been replaced by something called Google Lens.

Google image search is a useful tool, that lets a user find similar images to a reference - larger, smaller, sometimes in foreign languages, and so on. It does something specific and does it well.

Google Lens....I have no idea what it's trying to do. It seems to be some vaguely AI-driven tool that finds "similar" things. Maybe similar art styles? Maybe something with similar metatagging? I do know that it fails at finding "this same image, but larger," which is what I was trying to do. Lens seems to be a phone thing, so it's not terribly useful in Chrome on a desktop to begin with.

Google: I've come to accept that you will murder useful functionality all of the time, and sunset all of the tools that are actually of value to me. But can you at least not directly replace those things with a horrible parody of the same thing?

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