just seeing if google has got any more clever yet

hi there


nothing of consequence, look you see, just one of those experiments to pass the time of day.

earlier this year - April, for those of you who value precision - i tried to see if google could find a photo of me off of a search on an image on me. the results of this were interesting, to say the least, as you can see if you click on these words in yellow.

this is the image that i took to do the new search on, then. i figured four months, give or take a day, was most sufficient for this all mighty and all knowing google to get their act together.

yeah, i know - usually i would have glasses on. i opted, dear reader, to do the test via taking a "selfie" with that boss iPhone that Spiros gave me. an image of me taking a selfie kept reflecting in my glasses, or if you like spectacles, when i did, though, so off they came. that might go some way towards explaining the frustrated if not flabbergasted look i have, should you decide to interpret my look here as being either flabbergasted or frustrated.

who would i look like this time? if you have clicked on the link in yellow above, or just now then when i did it once more, you will see that the first go at this got very exciting when it turned out that i was either Michael Stipe off of REM, or possibly Mel Gibson. in regards of the latter, one would hope for a less shouty, sweary, pious, bigoted and offensive version, but if you will take someone from American and tell them "actually you are Australian" you're not going to end up with some sort of civil, polite and reserved sort of chap.

anyway, the image results. did google find me? no, but they are getting closer, it would seem.

indeed, google has at the least clocked that i am a white dude with a most splendid beard and a distinguished sprinkle of grey to the shade of my hair. it has not found me, as such, which is odd as they have at least a decade worth of pictures of me. but they are getting the general idea of what i look like. i would have to say that i am a trifle miffed that it didn't pick up on my smart anchor shirt, although you will note that most of the people it found that it reckons that look like me are wearing shades of blue.

what happens when you click on "visually similar images" you enquire? this.

whereas the first batch of results that came up this time around was, unless i am mistaken, pretty much celebrity free, as you can see here google reckons that i might be Hugh Laurie. also, as i scrolled down, there was a suggestion that i might be him what directed them Indiana Jones films, Mr Pink off of Reservoir Dogs or also possibly Nelson Mandela or Jacob Zuma. cheers.

what would my reaction be if google actually found an image off of me from an image of me? i am not sure. on the one side yeah, it's scary, as it would say there's the potential to take stalking to a whole new, crazy insane level. on the other, well, i suppose there would be some good that could come off of you finding out who people are from an image. the police would probably find it handy, maybe.

ah, you say. i have not done a fair, like for like test. well, yes i did. i took the original image and did a search on that again. here's the result of that.

virtually the same as last time, then, although it feels like there's more Mel Gibson, less Michael Stipe this time. also, no Sean Connery, but i think the suggestion that i might be Jack Nicholson is a new, and very welcome, one.

google claims that they crawl and index the web on a three month basis. they've had, then, four months to index the original picture i did this test with. i guess they've not got to my corner of their servers. let us not forget that blogger, so far as i know, is a google thing, and so i have handed them the picture of me to find.

a "visually similar" click on this image? sure.

smart that google thinks i might be that Ian McShane fella off of Lovejoy and that American western thing where he had a potty mouth. slightly less smart that google thinks i could be Rolf Harris or Saddam Hussein.

yeah, i will do another test of all of this in a few months. it will be interesting to see if it's third time lucky, if it would indeed be "lucky" for me to find an image of me on the google. i would have thought that anyone looking for me would have been able to work out how to do it without an image search, but you never know.

this is a thumbsuck, unscientific and unmeasured test, i know, but the evidence suggests my view remains quite correct - the google has incredible power and vast swathes of knowledge and information, but absolutely no clue as yet how to utilise it all. some say that google is a scary, sinister thing, grabbing all this info and data about us. well, it only stores what you give it, and what you do give it, as far as i can see, doesn't seem to get used beyond their advertising mandate.

should you opt to have a search for yourself on the google via an image, well, fingers crossed you get the result that you want!



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!