Look at all the beardy white guys with some yellow in the image! None of them are me. I tested Google, Baidu, Bing, and TinEye. That’s pretty wild.įWIW, here’s what other image search engines do with my selfie. It even matches my selfie both to a much younger version of me without a beard and to a version of me holding a box up obscuring part of my face. None of the images it finds look much like the original image different aspect ratio, different background, different details.

The new thing here is that Yandex is working not just as a reverse image search tool it seems to be doing facial matching. Some CNBC intern is gonna be in so much trouble! (This post is not an endorsement of Andrew Yang.) Facial recognition vs image search The first result on the Yandex result page also leads directly to his home page: Geoff Yang. It’s supposed to be Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate, but it is not.Ĭrop the image to Yang’s face, put it in Yandex, and you get thisĪll five of the first images look like our guy. How about a stranger? I used this today to identify who the “Yang” was in this image from CNBC. That’s kind of “the whole web”, but their index is nowhere as comprehensive as Google. And a person still has to sift through the near-matches of faces. It’s not perfect there’s no name provided directly, someone has to read the linked page to find one. Click on either of them and the web page it takes you to has my name on it. This is a good clear photo of me, which makes the results better, but it works with less good photos too. It’s never been on the web before this post and appears in no databases as I do these searches.

The Daily Mail also published an article based on this blog post. Also this Dec 2019 video reporting about Yandex facial recognition. Update: see this article about ClearView, a company doing facial recognition with scraped photos from Facebook, etc. This post was inspired by Bellingcat’s recent post on image search which noted Yandex’s image search as something particularly good and particularly called out the facial recognition. The trick is to upload photos cropped to a face and it’ll work more or less to find similar faces. I believe this is the first generally accessible facial recognition system with a large database. You can use Yandex Image Search right now as a pretty good facial recognition system for anyone who has labelled photos on the Web.

Photo finder face recognition upload