Image Search Engines

An add-on that will give you instant access to most of the websites talked about on this list through the context menu of your browser. Better than having five or six different add-ons for each individual search site.

This is the best broad image search engine I have used. It gives you the most results, it tells you what size/resolution you can get for an image and it has the most relevant comparisons and related images in my experience. It also is the most likely to guess correctly what the source of an image is, without you needing to sift through links. It also isn't going to look at a picture of Nico Yazawa and return a generic search result like "girl," like Google will 90% of the time.

I wouldn't say it's leaps and bounds over Google in every category, but it has a pretty hard edge over it and I have had the most success with it over the years. The one flaw, for me at least as an American English speaker is that the engine returns most results in Russian. This isn't a huge problem but I can see it being a barrier for some people.

I don't really like Google as a company, but this search engine does work and works better than some of the alternatives. Like the next entry. I almost always prefer Yandex but if other search engines do fail me, I will come back to this as a last resort.

Tineye is the worst image search engine that most people will suggest you use. It never has better or more results than the previous two and in my experience most of the time it doesn't have results period. I tried using this when I first got the fever of needing to know the source of everything, but I quickly stopped when I realized it almost never helped me with any searches.

Bing is worse than Google when it comes to overall results, but when it does find an image it has better, more relevant "like" images and a nicer, easier to use interface to browse them. I don't use it that often, but I do like the UI a lot.

This is the best niche search engine for Boorus and sites like those and I would say after Yandex this is the one I use the most and get the most successful results with. It's not great with real life/cosplay images, but in terms of drawn and animated content this search engine is king.

This one is better than the above for real life/cosplay stuff, but worse for everything else. Like Google I use it occasionally, but it's never the first one I go to when trying to find an image.