This morning, shark mega-enthusiast & PhD student David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) tweeted

I just uploaded a pic of me with a #Shark to Google Image reverse search and it IDENTIFIED THE SPECIES OF SHARK pic.twitter.com/fTpmHP7IVG

— David Shiffman (@WhySharksMatter) August 23, 2013

Here’s the screen cap image a little larger if you can’t make it out (click to embiggen further):

 

Is reverse Google Image search able to identify sharks to species? Yes, David included the search term “lemon shark” (David just let me know that Google included the text search terms itself… my mind is blown), but the fact that Google returned “Best guess for this image: lemon shark” might imply that they’re playing around with visual identification services, not just photo comparison. Considering how well reverse image search does at aggregating similar images, how many shark images are online & indexed by Google, and that many of those images are probably tagged with a species name nearby or in the metadata, I think the concept is entirely plausible.

Seeing how insect ID is kind of important to me, I tried it with a few of my insect photos, and got nothing. I even tried improving the odds by using search terms like David HAL 9000 Google did, and this is all I got:

 

I was beginning to get discouraged, but Marianne Alleyne (@Cotesia1) made a good point: perhaps it was the fact that David was sitting on the shark that mattered!

So, I reverse Google Image searched this photo

 

And it still failed.

Clearly Google loves sharks and hates flies (and passenger pigeons). Not cool Google, not cool.

I guess we’ll just have to stick to other web-based tools for identifying flies for a little while longer. Darn.