How Accurate is Google Image Search

How accurate is Google Image Search? More specifically how accurate its its capability to associate appropriate meta data with an image? Lets find out with a show-and-tell.

I tried the ego example. I searched for my name (angsuman) in Google Image Search.

Here are some of the images it returned:

Note: The only image of a human being is not mine.

By now attentive readers of this blog must have realized what is happening. Most of these images are associated with pages which are associated with my name like this blog or our Company page. In fact most of them were referred from one of the two web sites. It is interesting to note that some of the images are not hosted on my sites. They were linked from other sites. And yet Google thinks they are associated with me.
So it stands to reason you can hotlink Angelina Jolie’s (substitute anyone of your choice) images from your website and Google may think you are Ms. Jolie! So a search for your name will show her photographs, even if they are hosted elsewhere.

The second thing is often I have noticed that meta data of an image are not extracted based on proximity. The only page, from above, which actually has an image of a person named “Angsuman” has been properly captured by Google. However the displayed image is different!
I have seen it elsewhere too. Proximity apparently doesn’t play a role in assigning meta data to images.
Note: Meta Data is data associated with images. When you search for an image, you actually do a text search of the meta data. The images corresponding to the meta data are returned as result.

Yahoo Image Search returns better results in this test. It shows few relevant images along with my only picture on the web.