Try to find where a picture came from today and Google hands you a shopping list. That comes out of a legal settlement. Getty Images complained to European regulators that Google was promoting piracy, the two sides made a deal in February 2018, and one term of it deleted the button that took you straight to an image's original file. The "Search by image" button vanished the same day. Getty walked away with a licensing deal and bigger copyright notices on the page, Google walked away with Getty's photo library to use across its products, and the tool that traced a picture back to where it came from quietly lost its spot. March 2022 finished the job. Right-clicking an image in Chrome stopped saying "Search Google for image" and started saying "Search with Google Lens." By August, uploading a picture to Google Images sent you to Lens too, with the old behavior tucked behind a small "Find image source" link. Lens was built to answer a different question. Google says it handles close to 20 billion visual searches a month and that a fifth of those are people shopping. It compares your photo against a catalog of more than 45 billion things for sale, then shows prices, reviews, and ads. Google's search advertising made $63.3 billion in the three months ending in June, up 17% on last year. About $700 million a day. "Where did this image come from" sells nothing. "What is this and where can I buy one" sells everything. The haystack got bigger too. Google's own image generator has spat out more than 50 billion pictures, up from 5 billion last October. Searching for exact copies only works if a photo gets taken once and then passed around. A generated image gets made once, for one person, and plenty of them never get posted anywhere at all. Nothing under the hood broke, which is the part I find annoying. TinEye, a Toronto outfit doing this since 2008, has more than 85 billion images on file and still finds the crops and resizes of whatever you hand it. Lens has an "exact matches" tab buried in it. Google blocks face matches for privacy, so fact-checkers and investigators keep Yandex and TinEye open next to it. The button that answers "where did this come from" is now a tab you have to know about. The one that answers "where can I buy this" opens by itself.