Ever wanted a better version of a random image you see on the web? Images in blog articles or online newspapers are often too compressed to be appreciated, or just too small to fit your desktop background. Now, there’s a chance you won’t need to stretch crappy compressed thumbnail-sized jpegs anymore: it’s called TinEye.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine: it uses an image identification technology to compare your image to the others already in his database. This way, you can track the image history back to her original source, find slightly different versions, or simply a bigger copy.

The best way to use tineye is through the firefox plugin: this way, rather than having to submit an url directly on the search engine home page (you can even upload one from your pc), you just have to right-click on any image and select “Search image in TinEye” to open a new tab with the results. It’s really effective and easy, comparing to google’s keyword-related image search, although tineye greatest limit seems to be, at the moment, a still little image database…but they’re crawling.