Scanning… Scanning… Deep Scanning… Results may reveal names and aliases!

  • August 22, 2025
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Have you ever seen a photo of a public figure in the news or somewhere else online and wondered about someone else, apparently an associate or a member of their entourage, also shown in the same image? In the same way that, for example, when you re-watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in years, you thought the Buddy Holly impersonator waiter in the diner scene looked and sounded familiar and later on you checked the film’s listing on IMDB or its Wikipedia article to confirm that the actor in question really had been Steve Buscemi? I’m not exactly a news junkie, but once in a great while, it happens that I’m curious about a figure included, but not identified, in a publicly-shared photo. It’s 2025 and image-based search has existed in various forms for a while now, but getting a name for such a person is far from a slam dunk for a casually curious person who doesn’t care enough to devote more than a moment or two to the hunt.

If you plug the Rambo-character image I used for this post into Google Image Search, you get some results with a small Results for people are limited message:

Google Image Search results for an image of the face of the 'Rambo' character from one of the movies in the series of the same name.
Google Image Search results for an image of the face of the ‘Rambo’ character from one of the movies in the series of the same name.

For other images, even of persons who would qualify as public figures (e.g. newscasters, mayors of third-tier cities), you get no results and a more prominent advisory about results for people being limited:

Google 'Mayor of [X]ville' or something similar and the results will include names and photos. Isolate the face fom one of those images and plug it into Google Image Search and you'll get nada results and this message.
Google Mayor of [X]ville or something similar and the results will include names and photos. Isolate the face fom one of those images and plug it into Google Image Search and you’ll get nada results and this message.

The furthest extent of my efforts the last time this happened was to search for a reverse-image person lookup and give the first site that caught my eye in the results list a shot. It ended up pretty much how it did with the Rambo image lookup, which I ran and screen-recorded for this post and have embedded below for your amusement:

Screen recording of a reverse-photo search site looking for people with online selfies closely resembling a picture of Rambo, the eponymous protagonist of the Rambo film franchise, portrayed by the actor Sylvester Stallone.

As to how much value there generally is to results from this or other similar sites, I have no idea. Idle curiosity didn’t exert a strong enough pull that I was tempted to pony up any payment to see the purported matches. But I got a kick out of the bits of salesmanship incorporated into in the long, drawn-out scanning process, like the red-banner warning that THIS RESULT MAY CONTAIN ADULT CONTENT and the advisory at the bottom of the Unlock Your Results screen that cautions searchers about their report possibly containing links leading to uncensored images or vulgar content.