Hi Jean-Frédéric,
yes - you're right, I missed that. So sorry!!
We probably cannot scan the Internetz and running every single image out there against elog.io
No, for that purpose, I think Google Image Reverse Search of TinEye does a fair enough work. Involves a bit of manual digging, but scanning the Internet is indeed something that require quite a bit more resources than we could muster :-)
but do you by any chance log the successful hits in elog.io ?
Yes, we do. At the moment, we don't do anything with it though. What we would love to do is to take the information we gather - essentially pairs of images - and run that through PyBossa or similar crowdsourcing platform so that people can contribute to making matches between images by answering the question "Are these two images the same?"
If we get more than a few people saying that they are, we can make that connection in the Elog.io database, which could not only trigger some action on "re-use", but which would also make the information about that image pop up automatically when someone browses it without needing to separately click the "Query" button.
We do not want to add these matches directly without some validation since that would open up the possibility of abuse. But we think the crowdsourcing could work well, and that in itself opens up the possibility of using the same crowd to gather even more information.
Sincerely, Jonas