What does TinEye “first found on” mean?

TinEye’s reverse image search engine searches the web using an image and shows you where versions of that image appear online. The search engine results page includes useful information about your search and the matches that it finds, including the date on which TinEye first found the matching image.

The TinEye first found on date is the date the image was first seen by TinEye’s web-crawlers. If you find two similar images with different first found dates, this means that our web crawler found and indexed the images separately, on two different dates.

For example, this photo was taken on July 21, 2008, but the oldest TinEye match is from October 31, 2009, and it was found again on a different page on November 18, 2009

Sometimes, TinEye users are interested in finding out the first time an image has appeared on the web. Unfortunately, the TinEye first found date can’t tell you that; there might be a long gap between when the image was posted and when our crawlers first found it. Still, the TinEye first found date can often be useful when doing image verification. For example, if something claims to be an image of a current event, but TinEye first saw it years ago, you know that someone is trying to pull a fast one on you!