Medium Needs Better Image Search, STAT!

Holly Jahangiri
2 min readJul 28, 2020

It is unfortunate that the search engine is so rudimentary that it's impossible to use operators like AND or to group similar concepts into a single search.

This isn’t always obvious, but here’s an example (that I pull up because someone questioned whether there was some careless racism going on, and now, I’m not sure — I honestly thought it was just the lack of operators, at first, but now I wonder).

“bad hair cuts” yields:

Screen Capture by Author

But notice this:

Screen Capture

A search for “hair cuts” or “haircuts” yields similar results, but a search for just “hair” (which I originally theorized would look like the FIRST result), looks like this:

Screen Capture by Author

What if I search for GOOD hair cuts/haircuts?

Screen Capture by Author

How about just…good hair?

Screen Capture by Author

Maybe racist and misogynistic. Although I doubt this is intentional, and I’m sure that digging through the pile (30K+ results) would yield a diverse selection, it just seems odd that these are the first results for these particular searches, doesn’t it?

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Holly Jahangiri
Holly Jahangiri

Written by Holly Jahangiri

Writer and Kid-at-Heart, often found at https://jahangiri.us. Subscribe to my (free!) Newsletter: https://hollyjahangiri.substack.com

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