Image search (v1's catch-all)

What it does

Type a command the bot does not have — /french fries — and it replies with a picture of french fries, captioned with the page the picture came from. That is the feature: any unrecognised command is a Google image search for its own text. /qualquercoisa, /anything and /cualquiercosa are not searches at all; they print the usage example that explains the trick.

Behaviour that must not change

Searches are capped: 15 per person per day, 180 across the whole bot. Both are spent when you type, not when a picture arrives, so a search that gets refused still costs the bot one of its 180 — v1's arithmetic, kept. In v1 those numbers were counted separately inside each of five processes; here they are shared, so the cap finally means what it says.

Whether the search is filtered follows the group's safe-for-work setting, not a setting of its own.

A list of 49 words never searches — shell paths like etc and usr, and lone punctuation. It exists because every unrecognised command reaches this feature, so without it a stray / or a pasted file path would make the bot post pictures of /tmp. A message containing //, or a command aimed at a different bot, is ignored for the same reason.

A group with utility turned off gets silence here, not the "utility functions are off" reply its other commands send — this is the end of v1's command chain, and nothing answers past it.

How to verify it

qa/features/x_image_search.feature — ten scenarios, including one that only checks that a real command (/isalive) still answers. That one matters more than it looks: a catch-all that claims an update it should have passed on silently disables every command registered after it, which is exactly what the first version of this feature did to /random, /transcribe and /newwelcome. Run with python scripts/cb.py test. By hand in the sandbox, with CB_GOOGLE_SEARCH_API_KEY and CB_GOOGLE_SEARCH_CX set: /french fries in a group.