For me finding answers in Who's This Character forum is a real challenge, although I enjoy anime,I don't get to watch a great deal of it and many of the shows I do watch tend to be older. For me it's not a matter of recognizing a character in most cases, but of doing some research.

At the moment I don't have too many tips to share,however if anyone else here would like to share their tips for searching, be it with ACDB, Google, or anything else feel free to post them here. Now on to some tips!

Let's start with some basics, web search 101 as it were. Google's search is useful of course and most people by now know most of the tricks to refine a search. On the off chance that you don't, here is a link to the Google cheat sheet; http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html. Remember that you can combine operators to help refine your search, of course most of the time a Google search is pretty irrelevant as the name of a given picture has been changed many times before it gets here, however it has occasionally come in handy for me.

One thing I've noticed when doing Google searches is that leaving the file extension in place versus leaving it out can provide different search results, for example guessmeh.jpg versus guessmeh , of course neither one was very helpful in this case, but sometimes you get lucky.

Now how about something a little more useful, eh? Tineye . With out Tineye I would probably be lost here, it is bar none the single most useful tool I've found for doing image searches. What is it? A reverse image search, that starts with a given image and then finds websites that image has been used on.

Even if that image has been modified Tineye can still find it, for example if a characters hair or eye colour has been changed or the image has been combined with another image, Tineye will still recognize the it despite the changes.

Of course Tineye doesn't magically id the character, in many cases the image is posted in a random forum somewhere and all you really have to go on is an image name, which of course is where the Google searches come in.

It may also be helpful for me to note that sometime doing another Tineye search of your tineye results can prove useful, for example,try doing a tineye search of the first image in this thread , now assuming your on "best match", search the second image, now search the second image of that result. Notice how you get more results each time, of course it doesn't always work out this way(and in this case I could have found my answer on the first page of results) but a surprising number of times it does. You may also notice that searching the first image of your first results page will provide with slightly different results, this could also potentially come in handy.

Another good example of when it could potentially be useful to do another Tineye search of your results is if an image has been included in a collage of other images, as the other images may lead you the origin of the original image your searching for.

If you decide to make use of Tineye I highly recommend using the appropriate plug-in for your browser, I know the Firefox plug-in works great and it's much easier than manually uploading images to the Tineye engine.(seems faster too.)
http://www.tineye.com/plugin

Here is a list of all the sites we currently know of with some additional tips: Sites and tips to find info
Edited by CaptainBrain on 12/31/2011 Reason: Added new book details

[ Edited Dec 31, 2011 ]

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live forever in a cradle. - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky<*>

Thanks for the tips, dasgold. That plugin looks useful – I'm downloading it as I type this.

Somehow I had a feelnig TinEye would come up when I mentioned the words "reverse image search" in the other thread. I have been severly neglecting this tool. On the other hand, I'd like to know more about TinEye's limitations. I have searched for images on it before and found absolutely no matches, and I was fairly certain there were copies posted around somewhere. Maybe their index isn't 100% exhaustive.

As for what I do to find matches, outside of the few characters that I recognize immediately, I usually use whatever text I can find on the image itself (usually Japanese). People tend to miss this, mostly because they can't read it I'll wager, but it can be crucial for me to identify its origin. Therefore I encourage people to supply as much of the text on or surrounding the image they want identified, even if it doesn't look helpful to them.

Also, yeah, Google-fu is very handy. I recently identified a character on the phonetic spelling of another's name in a movie clip, all thanks to our favourite search engine.

Tineye and reverse image searchs, eh? I know of this reverse image searches:

Google: http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
Tineye: http://www.tineye.com/
IQDB: http://iqdb.org/ (anime boards)
SauceNAO: http://saucenao.com/. (mainly pixiv images)
ASCII2D (NSFW +18)(jp): http://www.ascii2d.net/imagesearch/. (Japanese sites)
Cydral: http://www.cydral.com/
Yandex (rus): http://images.yandex.ru/ (Russian sites)
Baidu (chn): http://stu.baidu.com/ (Chinese sites)

Before Google added a reverse image search I would start searching in Tineye and continue down on the list. Once Google added this new search, I almost never have to user the others. Some tips on using reverse image searches:

1. Usually, there are two ways to upload the image you are searching: from your computer or giving an image url (not the page, but the image). If possible use the url as it won't depend on your internet connection. This way it will be faster.

2. Using a page url, Tineye will search all the images in the page.

3. In Google you can drag and drop the image to the search box, being from another web page or from you computer.

4. If a image doesn't give enough results try using a graphic editor and cut a part of the image. Sometimes it gives better results, specially if it's a joined or edited image.

5. Lastly, there are many extensions, pluggings, complements, etc. that will make it easier, as they will add options on the right button menu. Most of them are site specific like the one mentioned earlier for TinEye, but there are ones that have multiple sites and are configurable. I use Image Search Options for Firefox and Chrome. The one for Firefox it's more configurable and includes all the searches I mentioned earlier.

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