I swear I remember seeing something on the news once where you could use a website to find out if a picture (e.g., that someone sent you, posted as their profile pic on facebook, etc.) is really a picture of them or if they grabbed it off the internet. If I remember correctly, you could upload the picture onto this website and, like a search engine using keywords, it searches the internet for that photo and shows you where it came from (if it came from a website).

Does anyone have any idea what website this is? Does this kind of thing even exist, or am I losing my mind? I googled it but came up with nothing.

Are you talking about sites like http://www.tineye.com/?

or you could just use Google Images

I find google images to be much more accurate and returns many more results than TinEye. I'll launch Firefox just for the sake of doing reverse image searches sometimes

What, doesn't it work on your alien technology? (Opera)

It does if I mask my UAString as Firefox, but like everything Google releases, they refuse to release it for Opera until a year later. It was only a few months ago I got the "new" Image search (one of the few times the feature gimp didn't bother me ).

Yes, that was the site! Thanks!!

Google Images does that. Just press the little camera in the right of the search bar.

Edit: Exo beat me

Wow I had no clue you could do that on Google. Just this morning I was thinking, 'wouldn't be cool if I could search for something using a picture'.

So, if I take a picture of say some tree outside my window and google with that image, will it literally tell me what kind of tree it is from my image? How the heck does that work? Is there an app for that kinda thing?

EDIT: Bah it doesn't work too well. I tried a bunch of random images I have and most of them turned up nothing but 'visually similar images' which simply used the same colors as what was in the image.

It'd be cool if this worked better someday.

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/