6 Best Face Search Engines
Facial recognition services can help with finding new investigative insights or embarrassing and forgotten old photos
In today's digital age, online investigators often need to search for faces to identify individuals for various purposes. From law enforcement to social media marketers, everyone needs to identify people from their images. We put our faces on social media and they stay on the internet forever. Facial recognition services can help to find additional leads in investigations, check if a person is a bot, or identify misinformation.
There are several free face search engines available that look for faces and help in their identification. To test them out, I used my own photo and made some unexpected discoveries.
OSINT for Face Searches
Face Recognition Services
Face Check: the service brings a variety of faces similar to those requested and links to where they were posted. The search is deleted in 24 hours, although investigators can create a permanent link. The service allows to remove your own photos from their searches after verifying identity with an ID. The website also has a Chrome extension. It found my face on three different pictures on various websites with 99%, 88%, and 86% certainty. All other results were weak matches and showed other people.
PimEyes: the website uses facial recognition but blurs parts of photos and links to the source websites. Paid users can have access to full links and unblurred photos. Users can also activate a safe search because the service can bring adult-only results. It also allows requests for the removal of the search results. I found tons of my photos and many other people who look very similar to me. I also found a photo of myself that I have never seen before and it was taken at a public event.
Search for Faces: the service searches Clubhouse, TikTok, VKontakte, and Odnoklassniki for matches of avatar pictures.
Reverse Image Search
Google Images/Bing Images/Yandex Images/Baidu Images: The search engines will find where the same exact photo was used but will not recognize the same person on other websites. Google Images found two of my photos on different websites and provided links. Bing, Yandex, and Baidu found none, but Yandex and Baidu showed many similar images.
TinEye: a popular reverse image search engine, that couldn’t find even one match of my photo. The service promises a private search without saving any data.
Karma Decay: a reverse image search on Reddit. The service found none of my photos.
As a disclaimer, facial recognition services have known issues with racial, gender, and age diversity. Multiple machine learning studies (here and here), made a few years ago, found the worst recognition results for women, people of color, children, and the elderly. Some similar services, like Clearview AI, had been deemed to violate the law in Europe, and they had to delete 20 billion face images.
