Yep, Getty Images sued them and Google had to remove the view images button, making the process of viewing the source image more difficult and convoluted.

I've now resorted to using DDG anytime I need to do an image search, and have been using it more and more myself when searching for anything related to IT or programming.

For those interested there’s an open-source Chrome extension that brings back the View Image button:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage

Awesome, thanks!

Yandex Image search is also very good, with none of the annoying limitations that Google has introduced. There also seems to be less Pinterest spam as well.

https://yandex.com/images/

Pinterest spam in DDG is a major annoyance, thou directly viewable images compensates somewhat.

I wish I could permanently remove pinterest from my version of the internet - it's literally spam at this point that never contains the content I'm looking for and adds no value while polluting search results.

ddg has -site:pinterest.com

but i dont know ho to automatically append that to every search, which is what i want.

I could at least plug that (and a few others) into my default CLI search as part of the query string.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506360

You can also set your user agent to googlebot and get the old google images back. Also the search results don’t look as bad.

I can't say for sure but I bet that's a problem they would love to have.