Now repeat the search but with "black people" without quotes.
Try the same for "white couple" without quotes.
Try the same for "black couple" without quotes.
Do you have any insight to this phenomenon?
on edit: grammatical correction
white people -> images of mostly blacks
black people -> images of mostly blacks
white couple -> mostly white couples with a decent percentage of mixed ethnicity couples
black couple -> black couples
You can e.g. do a search along the lines of site:<domain of online clothing store> <hair style/hair colour/…>, and at least for the most common and recognisable kinds of hair styles, it will actually return relatively reasonable image results, even though online shops most certainly don't have the habit of annotating the hair styles worn by their models on their product pages.
Along the same lines, Google is now also in the habit of OCRing any text content it can find in images and indexing that for search, too.
It's true that it'll still also take the text surrounding the image into account, but it's no longer true that image search is only based on that.
Don’t disagree with the main theory that search quality is deteriorating. I have to use increasingly contrived queries to get anything but bullshit blog spam, and indexing seems really odd at times.
/s