SearchThisImage

Inspiration

link Unfortunately, Twitter has been a common place to share misinformation. Knowledgeable people have managed to point out / filter out and move on. But not all can be expected to be knowledgeable in all areas and succumb to the lies. Fact-checkers play a thankless job of killing as many misinformation as possible. The fact that lies travel faster than facts is all the more true in social media than anywhere else. When an official handle of a Government organization posted a false image (link above), I decided to do something about it.

What it does

It is a Bot that does a reverse image search of the tweeted image using Google's Vision API and replies the URL containing the image and a URL that directly does the Google Image Search. Any twitter user can invoke the Bot by mentioning the ID (@SearchThisImage) as a reply to a tweet containing the image. If there are multiple images in the source tweet, the first one will be searched. Though Reverse Image Search can be done by anyone from their mobile phones itself, this will save the effort (and energy for google) for other users who want to do the same search.

How we built it

Being in software engineering for more than a decade, I started putting in a flowchart of how it should work. I've had experience of building a twitter bot earlier as well. I've used Google's vision API for one of my other projects. So, it is a matter of building the flowchart and combining my earlier experiences.

Challenges we ran into

I wanted to show the webpage that first published the image. But Google's API result did not have any date information. Due to this I had to go with the first result from Google. Sometimes, the result webpage was the tweet itself or a retweet of the same tweet. So, I filtered out twitter pages from google search results.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Launched on Product Hunt and got a decent traction. (32 Upvotes). link Have seen the purpose of the Bot well served numerous times. What could be a better accomplishment. link link link link

What we learned

It was originally intended to be a fact-checking reverse image bot. But, people started using to get more info about images. Mostly artistic and natural images are shared without much details. This bot has been widely used for that purpose also.

What's next for Search This Image

Built With

• google-vision-api
• python
• twitter-api-2