Google goes too far with new image search
A couple of days ago, Google released a new version of its image search. This turned out to be a huge slap in the face of content creators like me. When clicking on a thumbnail, the original image is hotlinked and embedded into Google’s result page. This costs bandwidth and the user has less incentive to visit the webpage of the original creator.
Here is a nice comment about the topic by a webmaster called EcoCatLady in response to Google’s blog post:
Well, it is easy to use – but it’s killing my biggest web site (a photography site) which is also my main source of income. In the past few days my page views have been cut in half while my bandwidth usage has increased – thanks to Google’s hotlinking of high resolution photos.
If this continues it will force me to either make some dramatic changes to the site (ie: removing all high resolution images and forcing the user to jump through a bunch of hoops to get them) or it will put me out of business all together.
I really don’t understand why Google insists upon harassing image publishers in this way… for all other types of content Google allows the user to find the content, but sends the user to the page to read the article or watch the video. But for image publishers it simply provides an easy way for people to access our content while circumventing our websites completely. The least you could do would be to disable right clicking on the hotlinked image and get rid of the “view original image” button so people would have to come to the site to download the content. It’s only fair…
I know user experience is paramount, and I’m all about share and share alike (I’ve even released all of my photos into the public domain.) But bandwidth costs money, and publishers do have to make a living, and for most of us that means we rely on page views and ad revenue. Is this groovy search feature really worthwhile if it puts the publishers out of business and ultimately means that quality images are being removed from the web because we simply can’t afford it anymore?
A straight forward technical solution is to add the high resolution image urls to the [robots.txt page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard). How to get google to use the smaller resolution rather then the large instead of remove the image completely from google’s index, like the solution above, I have to leave to some one more knowledgable then myself.
Well something clearly needs to be done about this. Hopefully Google will listen to reason and sort this mess out. Surely they must.
@ PJW:
There a lot of possible ways to do so. A (very) quick search suggest using mod_rewrite to either prevent accesing the images from another domain at all or replace them by lower sized versions (or something else).
Never done this before, but it should be possible if it is an issue for you.
@ Greyjack:
Its not that simple. Copyright actually prevents them from copying the image. Thus they have to hotlink the image if anything should be displayed at all. It would be possible to link to a size reduced version, but there is no standard I know of that describes the relation between them.
In the end the webmaster has to find a solution: Either use a robots.txt to deny accessing the image at all or replacing the image.
Hi Novil,
This is certainly a problem.
One suggestion that may help mitigate the cost while still allowing users to find your content via Google would be to switch to using a CDN or hosting your images on something like Amazon S3 to help lower bandwidth costs.
I have not used them personally but CloudFlare offers a free tier of usage for their CDN/service and does not charge for bandwidth.
https://www.cloudflare.com/plans
Hope this helps.
I suspect it’s something to do with Google wanting to make their image search more usable for automated searches.
For example, there are many people working on artificial intelligence programs that will use google image search to scan the Internet for images relating to key terms.
The hope is that you could (for example) go to a robot and say “Point to the chair.” The robot would then use google image search to get an idea of what chairs look like and then use that information to identify the chairs in the room. That sort of thing.
Which is really cool.
The problem is that it harms creators who rely on their images as a revenue stream.
If Google makes their image hotlinking opt-in, nearly everyone will fail to do so, making the service less useful to creators of potentially cool stuff.
If Google makes their image hotlinking opt-out, then image publishers have *another* technical hurdle to learn about and jump through when they’d probably prefer to be making more content to sell.
It’s a bugger of a problem.
I think that in this situation Google needs to make opting out easier and to publicize the methods better.
In my view an ideal compromise would be to have a prominent link on the image search results page that directs users to an FAQ on how they can easily remove image-based content they own from the search results.
Then again, I’m not a content creator. I align more closely with the robot-creator in my scenario above. So I’m likely skewed a bit in my thinking.
Thoughts?
Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that Google’s revised image search isn’t new – Bing and Yahoo are also showing you the full size image before you get a chance to view the page (and make the link to the original page rather small and unobtrusive).
Conversely, Lycos appears to have something which looks very similar to the old Google image search.
Google is just too greedy… They will do anything to get more info and files (that they can even sell if they decide to do so) And they never erase anything (buying a room full of new servers is nothing for them)
Even their google ads they more for them to earn money rather than really advertise somebody…
Common even in this comment section the ad that I’m seeing is the ad of my employer. And they decided to advertise it too me because in the past I have visited site of my employer (what a surprise don’t you think?) and the chance that I will visit it again through their add is slightly higher than some random site… But what the point to advetise something to people who already know about the particular thing. That way they actually reducing potential new clients of my employer…
Though when they advertised me my favourite MMORPG (that I have played for more than 4 years) was even more funny. (Of course I clicked those ads sometimes when I’m to lazy to type in URL)
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This whole thing’s really a shame. I don’t know what I’d do in that situation. Hope a solution shows itself.
Here’s the flipside to the coin.
Bandwidth may have gone up and visitors may have gone down, but that’s not necessarily telling the user’s whole story.
Before the new image search, users went to X site to gain access to hi-res version of picture in question.
They bypassed everything in the website looking only for that picture, find it, grab it, and go (website header that they’ll never remember, something about something who cares, some stupid advertisements on the side, there’s the pictures down there scroll scroll domo in the news, scroll scroll domo yelling at chicken, blah blah blah lots of domo pictures oh there the one I’m looking for, domo chasing the cat in a meadow, right click, save, close tab, never to frequent the site again).
Perhaps they pause momentarily to look at something catchy, then continue with their browsing.
Sometimes, they’ll try to find the picture on the website but it’s moved or lots of searching is needed to find it.
At that point, they’ll just close the tab and look for it on another website instead.
The website got a visitor, but the visitor did nothing but hog more bandwidth than if they were just offered the image by itself.
That’s zero value traffic, and there’s a lot of it.
If the user has to jump through hoops to get the image from your website, the user will mentally take a note not to visit your website again unless absolutely necessary.
Now, they get instant access and bypass the website with the new image search.
Same exact situation, website loses zero value traffic, less work for end-user to get same results.
If the user likes the image enough to be interested in others of a similar style, then the user will visit/explore the website and become valuable. possibly returning traffic.
If the user finds said image, re-sizes and shares it with others, they will search for said image on google to find the hi-res version, potentially gaining more valuable traffic for the website.
Bandwidth increases as a result of increased “word of mouth” advertising or by going viral, valuable traffic to zero value traffic ratio increases.
Traffic numbers and bandwidth simply do not necessarily tell the whole story, it simply indicates a paradigm shift.
Not saying it’s good for business in the immediate future, just until the rest of the web catches up to the new standard and puts a little less emphasis on unique visitors and overall traffic.
Anyone can make statistical observations fit whatever they want, but accurate ones reflect as many aspects as possible.
Put simply, you can’t force a web user to play by the rules if there’s a way around them, you can’t make them look at all of your website if all they want is a single image, you can’t make them click the banner ads that support you, you can’t get them to buy something from you unless they think it’s worth it, you can’t expect them to donate to your cause without garnering some loyalty out of them first for being a cut above the rest.
@ Cliff:
That’s not how I use Google Image Search. I normally want to see the origins of the picture, either to make sure it’s from the right kind of source (if I’m going for information) or to see if they say anything interesting about it.
Lately I haven’t been able to the page at ALL without further clicking, and that’s turning me off Googe image search entirely, to be honest.
@ Cliff:
I can agree with this perfectly. Websites that make it a pain to get the image i want, i learn to avoid. If the image is easy to obtain, and better yet, fits exactly what im looking for, THEN i visit the website itself, curious about what awesomeness may be lurking within. most of my google search usage is for small, quick things. a meme here, a comic there, a scene from a show im discussing with my friend at the moment, etc.
its rarely something i am willing to sift through a website for.
so basically, by making your images more readily accessible, you are providing free advertising, or perhaps are more coherent example would be the free tastes in malls and grocery stores: If you like it, you search out the source of the product and buy it.
Although I should clarify that I believe Daniel Schealler‘s idea to be a perfect compromise, and one that google would no doubt be willing to provide.
It is strange how most people lose either 50% or 75% of hits; that is, I have not seen anyone who lost 30% or 65%.
Besides, at least at WordPress, the hits/visitor has also gone down.
Besides, at WordPress, where I am, the management has been playing possum in a most spectacular way which could only mean that they knew.
And so, now I think the stats of the past were simply inflated and are now being corrected by general agreement among the platforms.
@ Daniel Schealler:
Courts usually rule at at a link is legal, whereas ripping and redistributing the image usually isn’t legal without explicit authorization. Thus Google may provide direct hotlinks, but must not mirror the images itself.
Also, rip-and-mirror also has negative impacts for the content owners. This way, since they still serve the image, they still control the access to the image. Also, they can see access and popularity statistics, since it still comes from their server.
Imagine if, to cause Google to stop distributing a mirrored copy of your image, you had to go file a takedown with Google. Much more hassle than just modifying your own site.
Probably a good middle ground solution would be for Google to continue offering image searches, but only return “original site” links unless the site’s robots.txt explicitly authorized mirroring for some pattern or site path. Best of both worlds, with few negatives.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! For now, I’ve disabled hotlinking to my images, which takes care of the full-resolution problem, but still lets the pics be searchable.