Google Images now only returns maybe 1-200 images by default, and if you click show me more, it shows a few hundred. The top results are consistently pinterest garbage, or similar types of spam. Images are consistently diverse from what I've typed in, and results seem curated to show a diverse types of results, which, given the small number of returned relevant images, means I rarely find something that looks like what I'm looking for.

What I've discovered, though, is that what google images now does, is it is only returning a few results. If you click a result, then there's a "new-to-me" "related images" section that shows images similar to THAT image, only in that window. It is in these images that I actually see the results I was expecting to show on the main page.

Its still far worse than google images 10 years ago, but not as bad as the UI makes you believe by looking at the initial results page.

For my money, yandex.com now has the best search results.

Beware though, yandex allows NSFW by default. You have to enable safe/family search. This is the opposite of Google and Bing, so it could get you in trouble at work. Those crazy Russians.

So, they just show you what you are looking for :-) I remember the days when Google would not try to protect me from "dangerous" sites and images.

Thanks man. OMG yandex blows google out of the water. Totally forgot about it

I know this sounds implausible, but I find Bing image search so much better than Google.

Not just for images. Bing seems to be a lot more closer to what Google search used to be a few years ago. Anything related to torrents or streams is pretty much impossible to find on Google. Any news not spouted from mainstream sources, gone from Google. My default search deck nowadays is a mix of Bing and DuckDuckGo.

it's nice to see my vague worries, bothering me in the back of my head put into words. Also good to know that i'm not crazy for thinking googles results are surpisingly poor and generic. I sometimes get the same feeling using google that i get reading a poorly transalated manual from a Chinese company. Generic, admire the fact some effort has been made, little laugh inside. Except this is google (and ironically, the chinese copywriters are probably using Transalate)

Yandex is surprisingly good at image search and allows you to crop the source image in-browser.

Yandex is CRAZY good. There's a Firefox plugin that lets you reverse image search from the right click menu, and it opens a tab for Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu and TinEye. Yandex is the king every time.

Bing had a problem with images of child sexual abuse, and with bestiality images. I don't know if they've fixed that.

Indeed, recently I tried Yandex for the first time and the results were way better for everything I had to search in the past 2 months since discovering it.