Slashdot Mirror
Google Redesigns Image Search, Raises Copyright and Hosting Concerns
An anonymous reader writes "Google has recently announced changes to its image search. The search provides larger views of the images with direct links to the full-sized source image. Although this new layout is being praised by users for its intuitiveness, it has raised concerns amongst image copyright holders and webmasters. Large images can now easily be seen and downloaded directly from the Google image search results without sending visitors to the hosting website. Webmasters have expressed concerns about a decrease in traffic and an increase in bandwidth usage since this change was rolled out. Some have set up a petition requesting Google remove the direct links to the images."
Webmasters have expressed concerns about . . . . . an increase in bandwidth usage
Google gets the image from the originating website, or I go there and get it myself. Either way, somebody (me or Google) has to go to the website to get the image. How does this cause increased bandwidth usage?
More people being linked directly to the high resolution image, but less people actually visiting the website. This isn't really that confusing.
It looks and works great! Now they just need to fix the SafeSearch bug so I don't have to use Bing Images instead (which, as Microsoft as it is, even gives explicit suggestions when its safe setting is off).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
If you even read the summary, let alone TFA you'll see:
"The search provides larger views of the images with direct links to the full-sized source image."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Referrer goatse
Some websites use a annoying script that redirects people when they click a image.
"decrease in traffic and increase in bandwidth". Does not compute. If there's a decrease in traffic because people are just being served the image without all the html/js fluff around it, how can there be an "increase in bandwidth"?
People download your content from Google's image view site that links to your content. Hardly anybody ever comes to your site and Google cashes in on the ad revenues while you still get to pay the bandwidth bill... kind of obvious.
Really?
Less people visiting the pages = less traffic
Browsers only pulling images from the pages = Increase in bandwidth
Once again, google screwing everyone who isn't google. But at least they "do no evil"' right?
How would they feel if we setup search engines that proxies their results, so they're having to serve all that traffic without theabilityto place ads, track clicks or build user profiles? Not good at all, I bet. It shouldn't be hard fora copyright holder to sue,after all they'll be be serving up full resolution versions of infringing material.
It's called hot linking or leeching and it has been a headache forever. You want to show content + ads but your server is used just to pull an image, thus no traffic and high bandwidth.
Fighting the good fight:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?cyberciti.biz/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*\.(bmp|tif|gif|jpg|jpeg|jpe|png)$ - [F]
Took me 5 seconds https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&tbo=d&spell=1&q=robots+.txt+for+images&sa=X&ei=FJYRUeytEIeGiQLemYGIDg&ved=0CCsQvwUoAA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.41934586,d.cGE&fp=7c0022b148dcff04&biw=1680&bih=860 with the results http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35308
How about a small effort from the site owners?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I think it still exists?
robots.txt
If you even read the summary, let alone TFA you'll see:
"The search provides larger views of the images with direct links to the full-sized source image."
Yes, I did read TFA. And nowhere does it explain how you can have decreased traffic but increased bandwidth usage. Because it's not possible. Decreased traffic = decreased bandwidth usage.
Here's the real problem (quote from TFA):
When people get the full resolution image, they have no reason to click to go to the URL.
Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.
Nope, too easy.
Lots of sites put hi-rez images on file, and link to them via a thumb nail.
The majority of visitors don't request the hi-rez images, at least not all of them.
But posting a link to a high-rez image can get your bandwidth slammed, serving images, but nobody requesting the web pages. Especially if its porn, or happens to hit the search topic of the moment. Without the ability to serve ads, these websites make no money.
Of course, if the complainers had an actual clue, they could just put a robots.txt file in their image storage, which Google seems to honor.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You put shit on the internet and complain when people look at it.
Either put in place software to stop google from indexing your shit.... Oh wait you want google to rank you (and your images) high on the search results but don't want people to download the files. Fuck that. Die in hell you cunts.
Really?
Less people visiting the pages = less traffic
Browsers only pulling images from the pages = Increase in bandwidth
Wrong.
Browsers only pulling images use less bandwidth that browsers pulling the entire page.
They made it less likely to display porn. Now how am I supposed to view porn at work?
It isn't as obvious as you make it sound. Scenario 1: Google links to your page. People who want your image click through, your server throws them the whole page plus the high resolution image. Scenario 2: Google links only to your image. People who want your image download just that, your server sends them just that. All else being the same, scenario 2 is less bandwidth, not more, because you'd be serving the same image either way, but in one case with and in the other case without all the other stuff on the page as well. It's entirely possible for it to add up to more, but this depends on how the new search affects people's usage of the results- it requires that more people actually click to view the full-resolution image as a result of the changes. That's a likely, but not necessary outcome.
IIRC, jpeg images allow header data that includes copyright info. If you don't care about use of the image, leave it blank. If you do, insert the copyright info. Google's bot can look for copyright data and if it finds it, it can link to the original html page. Otherwise, it can give a link for a direct download.
I think there was something on /. awhile back that talked about some system for the owner to indicate how an image could be used, e.g. commercial, non-commercial, free and so on. Couldn't find it on a quick search, but that might be another option to tell Google how to handle an image.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
If webmasters don't want people "stealing" photos without viewing directly on their website, they are more than welcome to instruct their web servers to not display images to freeloaders. Look at the referer header, if the request didn't originate from your site, then don't serve it.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Browsers pulling all content including images as part of a relatively low to medium traffic site = bandwidth. But it's your content being served, which is presumably the reason you're paying the bill for that bandwidth.
Browsers pulling full sized images without any of the site context as part of Samuel T. Jackson expletive Google traffic = way, way more bandwidth, no benefit to the website whatsoever. Google gets the ad revenue, you foot the bills.
I suspect Google left an all-important comma out of their (unofficial) motto: "Don't, be evil"
# cd
# cat - > robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
<crtl-D>
#
Problem solved!
Karma: Bad
This benefits my ecommerce site. All the images are watermarked and display our products. The more viral ones show sexy women showing off the product. Those rank at the very top for related key words. This uses up extra bandwidth that I pay for, but it's great for me, since I WANT to share these photos and get them out there.
Samuel T. Jackson? Does he pity the fool who says "what" again?
Google has had the "See Full-Size Image" Option for years. Hell, maybe even a decade at this point. It's been there for all image searches for as long as I can remember; it was just a hyperlink instead of a button.
If you're running a website with Apache, you can configure Apache to look at the HTTP_REFERER header and see where the web surfer was when they made the request for the image. If they weren't on your website, (or if they don't provide the header, an act to be widely discouraged), just re-direct them to your home page instead of serving the image.
I would think that other web servers could do the same thing, one way or another.
For most people, it costs money -- perhaps not a huge amount, but still, real money -- to put up a website and serve content to the world. The expectation, if not agreement, is that you'll look at the site's content on the site.
The webmaster's position is no more hostile than that of the deep miner: There are expectations, but no promises.
Google's search goes far beyond fair use, as far as I'm concerned.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You're talking two different things.
Bandwidth is, duh, bandwidth.
Traffic is page views or something like that. You downloading an image from my site directly through google gives you the image and doesn't give me page views and ad revenue.
Of course, if this is happening it means that your average browser (person, not software) doesn't care enough about the photo to bother actually going to your website but without having to do that is willing to grab a copy of the image. Should tell everyone something about the real value of the photo.
You used to get traffic actually visiting your site. That meant full page loads, but a lot of that is text which is low bandwidth. You now have less traffic (unique IPs hitting your site), but they're JUST downloading hi-res images which leads to a net increase in bandwidth.
Also, ads don't have to be shitty and annoying. Slashdot uses ads, and even though I can I don't turn them off because they're relatively passive. Hosting and bandwidth cost money, and a lot of sites rely on small ad revenue to help offset those costs.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Ah, point taken.
Then why do you like the image so much? It is, after all, part of their 'shitty' website.
Although it took me a while to get used to, I sort of miss the old way. For a lot of image searches, I'd get the image and see the thumbnail of the website behind it. Often the website looked interesting enough (and related to my search) that I then went to the website directly. I discovered quite a few nice sites and blogs that way...
Now, I just get the picture with no real reference to where it came from. Sure, there's a link to the page but it's text and gives no indication what the site is about. There's far less incentive for me to actually visit the hosting site.
So I miss out on potentially interesting sites and the hosts miss out on useful traffic. Lose/Lose either way.
He ain't getting on no plane, with or without snakes. In fairness, I've been ill. :)
As a user, I like the convenience but the last thing I want is for all kinds of legal disputes and possible regulations as chances are they'll overreach in banning what Google and other search engines are allowed to do, and we'll end up with less than we had before Google pushed it like this. "Don't be evil", and at least allow sites to opt out.
Redirect to a black / porn image ...
and all it did was send requests to google and re-display them without ads or with different ads, then google would be the one complaining.
This is why this is a non issue. Any admin worth their salt can disable hotlinking. This just means an increase in hotlinked disabled sites.
Mark Anthony Collins
if you run a website you know damn well that having google put full res image download link will massively increase your bandwidth usage with absolutely 0 increase in traffic.
You have the option not to appear in the search listings. Perhaps try that, that will reduce people stealing your bandwidth.
Agree with everything this AC is saying. Additionally, the only real non-aesthetic difference is that Google doesn't simultaneously load the page in the background, unscrollable under a semi-transparent layer. That counted as a pageview and was chargable to any advertisers on the page, but the page was pretty much unviewable and unusable - so users were not genuinely consuming content nor advertising. This would have been frustrating for advertisers as they'd still be paying for this pagecount, and frustrating for website owners as a full page of assets were being downloaded without being usable, wasting their bandwidth. The new design improves *everything* for *every* party. It's not at all a perfect solution, but it's definitely not a step to be complaining about. The only solution that immediately comes to mind is that pressing the "full size" button (or whatever it's now labelled) could open the fullsize image in a new tab while opening the full page in the current tab.
Google always offered links directly to the original image, though it did load the actual site in the background. And you've always been able to prevent the direct image links by referer control.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can google show a link with summary to a news article? Can they just show the entire article?
Can google show a link with summary to an image (i.e. thumbnail)? Can they just show the entire image?
I cannot imagine any reasonable person would differentiate the two situations. The content the Google user is actually looking for is the high-res image itself (my assumption based on my own personal decision process that leads me to visit images.google.com). As soon as you start serving up the full content, you're appropriating it.
You have the option not to appear in the search listings. Perhaps try that, that will reduce people stealing your bandwidth.
So we can choose to pay for the privilege of providing content for Google image search so that Google can grow fat off of ad revenue or we can choose not to be discoverable by the internet using public? That's like saying that an ISP can always choose not to be connected to the network backbone if they don't like the terms being offered by the monopoly that owns it.
I do not understand.
If something is copyrighted why put it online, and when someone downloaded that thing (be it an article or a photo or a song or an animated clip or anything) then those "copyright holders" start complaining ...
I just do not understand them.
I mean, if that something is dear to you, do you put that something in places where everybody has an access to it ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What's going on is fairly obvious if you read the article linked in the sentence "Webmasters have expressed concerns about a decrease in traffic and an increase in bandwidth usage since this change was rolled out."
The article says nothing about an increase in bandwidth usage. The anonymous reader who submitted the article obviously just made that part up, as anonymous people on /. do, without regard for whether it made sense or accurately reflected the link being given.
On one hand, I think the site owners deserve the traffic. On the other hand, it seems like at least a quarter of the pages end up being dead when I click on them, or redirect to sites attempting to install malware on old versions of Firefox, or seemingly have nothing whatsoever to do with the image that's supposedly there.
A compromise might be to allow users to open the referring page in context immediately, open the cached page (with live content) after a 2-second delay, and allow users to grab the full-sized image directly from Google's cache after a 10-second CAPTCHA-guarded delay. Then, users would have every incentive to try viewing the page in context, falling back to the cached page if the original page ends up being down/borked/whatever, and being able to grab the cached image if all else fails.
Going a step further, Google could come up with some free digital watermarking scheme that allows a 48-bit (give or take) payload to be encoded into the image at a user-selected strength (allowing him to balance robustness, file size, and visibility... pick any two of the three).
The upper few bits (let's say, 4) would indicate the version. Initially, it would be 0001.
The next 40(give or take) bits would be globally-unique, and allow somebody who knows the value to obtain meta info about you in a sensible manner. If they're all 0, it means you're using a generic permissions watermark that doesn't identify ownership, but simply restricts use.
The lower 4 bits specify explicit restrictions
* do not contextually-index
* do not cache full-sized image
* do not perform face recognition of any kind
* do not index for similarity to other images
A value of "0000" would allow search engines to index the image, unless you restricted them in some industry-standard way via metadata referenced to your unique id. For the generic value with all 0s, 0000 means "go ahead and index this".
A value of "1111" would indicate that the image, when encoded with a 4-bit watermark, should not be indexed in any way, shape, or form, regardless of future extensions to the standard that might define additional permissions, and regardless of what any indirectly-referenced meta-info might or might not say. Let's call this the "Stop Facebook from Permissions Creep in a GPLv3-like manner" anti-permission.
Didn't Google have direct image links before?
I actually liked it when they showed the original page the image was from in the background. It gave context. Unfortunately, that's gone now.
On a brighter note, at least I won't be redirected to jump through hoops on the original site even though Google's frame was still present.
Google just turned every other web site on the planet into MegaUpload. Sort of. "Don't, be evil" indeed.
I think that if I was a photographer, I would be OK with Google caching full quality images as long as they put their own annoying watermark all over it with the URL where the image came from clearly visible.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
A high resolution image can easily take up more data than HTML fluff and a thumbnail.
scenario 2 is less bandwidth, not more, because you'd be serving the same image either way
Not necessarily.
Most web designers use a thumbnail or a medium resolution photo on the web page. They do this so that the web paints fast.
But they also know that most people do not click for the high-res image. This saves them bandwidth, often enough to
serve the entire page in less total transmitted data than if they always sent the big images.
So you may well not be serving the same image either way, especially if you have a clue about web design.
But with google finding and showing the large ones, it could become more expensive.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ahem? They used to be downloading text+hires image, and now they're downloading just an image, and you say there's increase in bandwidth? How?
Yes, I did read TFA. And nowhere does it explain how you can have decreased traffic but increased bandwidth usage. Because it's not possible. Decreased traffic = decreased bandwidth usage.
Here's the real problem (quote from TFA):
You're being deliberately obtuse and a troll. I wish mods would mod you as such.
"So we can choose to pay for the privilege of providing content for Google image search so that Google can grow fat off of ad revenue or we can choose not to be discoverable by the internet using public?"
Exactly. And I gather that you consider this an unfair choice? Oh SURELY Google should point it's users to your website and don't get a penny from the process...
I do not know, so I can only come up with two possibilities.
1. Google doesn't cache the images for each search, so loads images from the servers each time, so increased bandwidth, instead of a smaller cached thumbnail.
2. More users are happy with the Google supplied image, so they do not go to the source. This would be a decrease of effective bandwidth or a higher bandwidth per unique page view on average. Images w/ text + ads (or eyes on products / services) verse Image alone. It is an issue of loss of possible traffic in the most simple terms.
I guess anyone complaining about it hasn't seen Bing's image search. Microsoft has had better image search functionality for some time and does everything that Google's "new" image search does.
>> Browsers only pulling images use less bandwidth that browsers pulling the entire page.
Someone visiting a page on your site downloads the HTML which is, say, 3kb, and the image which is say 500kb. So yes, 503kb vs 500kb.
Now someone just googled your images and pulls 10 through googles image search - you now have 5 MB of bandwidth used, and no visitors. And that visitor number might have been useful for selling add space, hoping for add clicks, or maybe you were hoping to sell them something. End result, someone looking for one of your pictures who had come to your site directly would pull 503K, whereas through google, they might just pull up all your pics that show up on the front page and potentially hit you up for 5 or 10 MB of bandwidth.
Oh well you're right, google does no evil. People better adapt to providing google free content and stop thinking that they should have an attempt to make money off of it even though that's what google will be doing.
If someone was searching for a photo of a rose, and google gives it to them, it still had value, its just that google stole that value from the creator.
novel solution. Either go out of business by pulling yourself from search listings or go out of business because google is poaching your content.
Useless conversation, everyone here thinks everything should be free save for whatever activity it is that provides them money. Been that way ever since Napster. At least I get a good laugh when I see all your jobs going to India.
They make billions of billions dollars. Google is hardly a charity.
And if any other company did what they do, you guys would all be up in arms. But since they're google, they get a free pass. This simply amazes me.
Oh, I get it now, You're a moron. You don't understand the difference between thumbnail images and higher-resolution files.
Maybe it's more that OP doesn't understand how Google image search works. I always thought that Google image search pulled in the full-sized image from the remote server, and then resizing into a thumbnail was done either on Google's servers or in the web browser. But if I understand you correctly, Google image search was previously smart enough to pull in the thumbnails that were already on the remote site (if any even existed).
It probably also has to do with a different method of measuring traffic. OP seems to measure traffic by measuring how much data is transmitted over a given period of time. You seem to measure traffic by measuring... I don't know, number of hits over a given period of time, regardless of how much data was transmitted?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Took 'em long enough. Screw being redirected and digging through dozens of forum posts for what you came for. Half the time, the image doesn't even exist anymore.
I suppose, if there is no "page that contains the full resolution image" in the first place. I guess Google image search is most likely smart enough to be following links that look like they're going to another version of the image, assuming they're true links and not lightbox loader script click events. As for having a clue about web design, most amazing example of this I've seen recently was when I was looking for huge images with Google, and landed on some sort of corporate blog type web site that took an extraordinary amount of time to load, only to finish and have the image nowhere in sight. It seemed to be very close to what I wanted for some wallpaper or whatever I was after, so I took the time to look more closely at the code, and found buried in a side panel in some minor place on the page a spot for a thumbnail image set to display at 111.32 x 74.36 (yes, the styled size was specified as a decimal number of pixels). The actual file set as the img src, OTOH, was 11,132 x 7436 and 10.5 MB in size. This one image, despite being a tiny, inconsequential part of the whole page design, was causing a page to take probably close to a minute to load that could have been served in a second or two even on the slow server they seemed to have...and then you couldn't even see the image in the end anyway, because Chrome apparently can't handle resizing a 10.5 MB image to 1% of its height and width and successfully display it.
If someone clicks the Google Image Search 'high-resolution' link for one of my photos from Flickr, they get a medium-resolution version with no description, attribution or copyright information. (Example search page here.
If they go to the ad-free Flickr page, they get links to much higher resolution versions, associated images and also get informed that it's under a super-open Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I agree with you that the submitter has made that choice quote up, but what happens when you put it in the context of a Web Traffic Analyser?
If your "hits" measure is based on the number of requests to page content (.asp*, .htm*, .php*, etc.) then you are likely to see the ratio of hits:bandwidthUsage drop since Google rolled this out. People using the Image Search interface are looking for images - so they will likely click the direct image link instead of the page-in-context link, thus increasing your bandwidth while not increasing your hits.
Google hosting and delivering the large image ... bad. Googling showing where the website makes the image available to everyone ... good. Webmasters: don't like it? Then don't deliver it. That's what the referrer is for.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What's "Bing"?
Am I the only person amused by the concept of "stealing" something from a website that makes it publicly available?
$ curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/deep/link/path/yourimage.jpg -o yourimage.jpg
The cost of running your website is not Google's problem. If you don't want someone downloading something from your website, don't put it on your website.
So, use robots.txt to remove yourself from their search listings. Problem solved.
if these webmaster really believe that most people don't know about 'right click' & "save image as...", then they are living in lala-land.
If I'm really fast, I can get to the links at the (ever moving away) bottom of the page and find my way back to the old GIS, but only if I'm fast enough.
Please, Google, put these coders on a project that NEEDS improvement, and give us a useable GIS back. Thank you.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Really the same issue webmasters had with deep-linking where Google sends the searcher straight to the page they wanted without having to wade through the front end of the website. And yes, the same mitigation techniques such as robots.txt and refferring block apply with the same drawbacks of those searchers not bothering with the site that's making things more difficult for them.
So they fiddled with some things, but it's still the same: endless pages and you have to hover or click to see details. Luckily the old one can still be used by blocking the user agent string in Firefox and Seamonkey.
Why such vitriol at webmasters who want the people interested in their images to visit their sites? Not all sites out there are shitty, or have shitty ads, or even have ads at all. Maybe a blogger who posts political photos also wants visitors to check out their writing.
Also, "Get over it already" is a pretty obnoxious phrase.
Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.
Spoken like a typical leech. No surprise, but always amazing.
Absolutely! - I know I am, and I know many others are... Leeches that is. Proud user of AdBlock-style software for two decades.
Advertising has gone from bad to painfully awful in amazingly short time, rendering most pages useless without ad-blocking software. It began with that first animated banner, blinking or jumping to attract attention and today you get full page ads, competely blocking the real page, complete with loud music, a semi-yelling salesman or worse.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Yes, I did read TFA. And nowhere does it explain how you can have decreased traffic but increased bandwidth usage. Because it's not possible. Decreased traffic = decreased bandwidth usage.
Bandwidth: bytes transferred
Traffic: visits to your site, clicks through to other pages, attention held, content delivered.
By directly linking to hi-res images, their bandwidth goes up, but actual page views go down. You're hung up on your presumption that traffic == bandwidth, but the word traffic has more than definition.
I doesn't have to be all or nothing with robots.txt. You can simply exclude certain paths, like /pics, and then the stuff in there won't be indexed. Quite simple and handy actually.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Disallow: /images/
Poof, done.
You used to get traffic actually visiting your site.
You used to get people who grudgingly went to your site to click save as...
You now have less traffic (unique IPs hitting your site), but they're JUST downloading hi-res images which leads to a net increase in bandwidth.
You get the same amount of traffic (unique IPs), but they're just going to the image, not your webpage. Bandwidth use is hardly going to change. You're not going to see an influx of new users if your main source of hits was google image search.
If your content outside of the images was not worth the users attention, you'll get less actual visitors. If you don't like it, there's been ways to block this kind of use for years, but that won't increase the influx of users either. Most of the complaints about this feature are lazy webmasters who see easy money evaporate. And man, those ad revenues sure are worth so much moneys... Provide actual content, build up a community, offer features your community wants, et voila, you have recurring traffic that doesn't leech your bandwith via google image search.
Also, ads don't have to be shitty and annoying.
Don't worry, practically everyone is using adblock anyway. I'd like to repeat my sentiments on the whole "The income of my business depends on ad revenue" thing: if you are going to sponsor your hosting solely on the income provided to you by advertising, don't be surprised if you're at the mercy of the ad-network and the users not even downloading your ads. It's like all common sense has gone out of the window with website hosting.
In this case, don't be surprised if Google decides that it's in it's best interests to screw you out of ad income, because the chances are high that they're the ones providing you ad income in the first place. Make your site worthwhile to visit, and users like me will come back and even *gasp* turn off adblock or pay for some feature you have that's useful to us. If you had that kind of service, you wouldn't be bitching about ad revenue, you'd have more interesting accounting problems. But if you're just hosting lolcats image macros, good luck with that.
Dear user, if you don't like my shitty website, don't click on my shitty images.
if you don't want to allow hotlinking directly to the image, then configure your server to disallow the hotlinking, problem solved
"They make billions of billions dollars. Google is hardly a charity."
Nobody said they are. But it's implied by the poster above that they should not profit from pointing users to his website. So... Your argument somewhat counters itself.
I do not know, so I can only come up with two possibilities.
There's a third possibility. The submitter made that quote up. It's not true.
I know it's easy to toss out the answer of a robots.txt file and think that's the end all, but let's take a minute and look at this intelligently.
Artists (photographers, designers, etc.) create work and put it online for a reason. It could be for their own artistic expression, it could be to be presented with content, it could even be to get eyeballs to view nearby ads. It is the creator's right to determine the means of presentation of their work. In fact, this right is protected by US copyright law. You can read it yourself right here: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106 ...(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly;"
"the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
Just because the work is hosted on an internet server does not mean that Google is allowed to serve up full resolution images within their pages, with their ads, in a format of their choosing. The right to use thumbnails as a representation of an image to facilitate a search was deemed legal, but this is not that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Google_Inc.
Without the ability to monetize a creative work, there will be no more creative work available. Not everything in life is free. By reducing traffic ( and I'm not speaking of the mere bandwidth from hotlinking ) to a website, that ability is greatly reduced. Blocking Google altogether can reduce that much further, obviously. How are the funds to create these works that you all seem so intent to help yourself to supposed to be generated?
Speaking of monetizing and robots.txt files, let's look at image licensing. There is a huge issue here in that Google is presenting high resolution works that have been legally licensed by an end user for their business needs. Google presents these valuable images ( valuable because a: someone paid money for a license and b: because you want to take it and use it ) with an interface that facilitates easy full size download of content with minimal or no information about the copyright information pertaining to the image.
In fact, Google makes it appear, and does not really make an attempt to contradict the idea, that "everything on the internet is free". Other businesses, who are not as smart as the legal user, are tricked into thinking they can download and use the image as they like. The licensor of the image, who makes their living by licensing the image legally to various businesses, is not able or does not have access to put a robot.txt file on the business' server, and besides, blocking a client as a matter of practice would prove damaging to further business.
So try to look a little behind the curtain, instead of just at your own interests.
Or, you could just not visit sites run by people who want to show ads. You obviously think the person whose content you're trying to consume is making a poor choice. You don't like their judgement, you think they're offending you ... so, just walk away. That's how you stop seeing those ads. Become a site's member or whatever is needed to reduce the ad displays, or just go away.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I for one like the new image search.
When using the old I often experienced that if you clicked through from Google, you'd either be unable to grab the full size image or had to fiddle around to bypass stupid blocks to get it. Using the new search it's easy just to grab the picture from Google.
People whining about copyright are either plain stupid or just ignorant about how the web works. If you put an image online, it will be copied, it will be linked to and it will be used by others as their own. That just the way it works. You can complain or file suit, but the fact is that it will be just a drop in the ocean.
Just don't put it online if you don't want to share it. If you put it online anyway, face the fact that most of this 'abuse' is both innocent and variations of fair use, i.e. it doesn't cost you anything.
Same thing with nudes hacked/leaked/shared-by-ex-boyfriend - if you don't make any they can't be posted online. If you make them anyway, you're basically asking for it.
What's "Bing"?
A search engine that doesn't forcefully censor the results of your searches.
As someone who uses Google Image Search quite a bit, I have this to say:
Please.
Someone look at my images, either at my site or at Google
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
If someone clicks the Google Image Search 'high-resolution' link for one of my photos from Flickr, they get a medium-resolution version [staticflickr.com] with no description, attribution or copyright information.
You don't embed that in the EXIF information?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
You want to show content + ads but your server is used just to pull an image, thus no traffic and high bandwidth.
I think what you meant was... you want to make your content publicly accessible in order to increase your exposure, but you also want ad revenue. What happens is that once you make your content publicly accessible you cannot force people to also view your ads, so your server is used just to pull an image, thus no ad revenue and higher bandwidth.
It's called having your cake and eating it too. You can't make your content publicly accessible and then complain when the public accesses it in a way you don't like.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Most of it, yes - but Flickr helpfully strips out said EXIF data for the reduced-size versions of the photos. This combined with Google's allow-download-without-seeing-any-attribution-details? Nice!
Actually, doing some more testing - Flickr has an optional (and trivially easy-to-defeat) system to prevent visitors from saving displayed photos to their computers. Google Image Search goes straight past this - so an all-rights-reserved, the-owner-has-disabled-downloading-of-their-photos image can be saved straight from Google with no indication whatsoever of the photographer's wishes.
(While I'm really not protective of my own stuff, I know other people are of theirs - Google's behaviour here is at the very least terribly impolite.)
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Damn! Want some cheese with that whine, bitch?
Grow a fucking pair. If you don't want your shit displayed, TAKE IT OFF THE FUCKING INTERNET.
Not everyone views the high res photo, they might just look at the thumbnail.
Now the site gets almost no traffic, but to just the photo itself. Which doesn't really do the site much good.
You forgot the more common scenario 3, a page with a thumbnail. Google used to link to the page, user goes to the page, click on thumbnail, see high res image. Now users go to google, see high res image.
Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.
Apparently a LOT of people cared enough about the webmasters "shitty" website, to want the photo the webmaster was offering. It wasn't free for the webmaster to offer the photo.
What braindead users are praising Google over the "intuitivness" of the idiotic new image design? It is awful. I have to click multiple times now to get to the website. First click brings me to some other google page, with one small url that links to the site. How is this intuitive at all?
When I click on the photo I expect to get taken to the website, much like when I click on the search result in the text searches.
And copies results from Google.
So in scenario 3, the server load is even higher: page contents, plus thumbnail, plus high res image after all of that. The same fact holds true, that the change very well could result in a reduction in bytes served, and the final outcome depends on how user interaction plays out after the change as compared to how it did before.
Bing for 100$.
What is the last name of the Chandler character in the insanely popular sitcom called Friends?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Errrrr!
Right question: What's the noise the Machine that goes Bing! makes?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Even if that was true, why should I care as long as I get better results?
I have several websites that I like whitelisted in adblock. In general though, I disliked the video ads from a few years back enough to blanket block just about everything.
If the webmasters would prefer we could recode adblock to download them, but never show them. Would that make them happier? At least their logs would seem to show that they were loaded but not clicked on.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
One thing about those online forums is the amount of truly deranged people out there. It's quite an eye-opener. Worse. Deranged, stupid, ignorant, and arrogant. And dishonest. It's simply unbelievable.
Yeah, the Internet is for sharing. So, let's all copy/steal the materials posted/created/written by Others. Why stop at just websites? Let's do the same with books, magazines, movies, music, etc. It's all information of some sort or other that SHOULD be shared. If you don't want your work copied/stolen DO NOT WRITE ANY BOOKS OR MAGAZINES OR ESSAYS, DO NOT MAKE ANY MOVIES, DO NOT COMPOSE ANY SONGS. Jeez, that's SO OBVIOUS. STOP WHINING, damn it!
Google is God. They (like God) have the Divine Right to do whatever the Hell They Want because they (all but) own Internet searches. If Google wants to scrape your site and post your high-resolution images on its search engine for all to see and copy without having to visit your filthy website filled with repulsive ads (who cares if you need to earn a living???), that's Good. Why? Because it's GOOGLE who decides what's best for EVERYONE based on its INFALLIBLE research. As well it should. Because Google IS GOD. And like GOD, Google KNOWS what's best FOR YOU AND FOR EVERYONE. Got that? Yes? Good!
If Google is a near-monopoly when it comes to online searches, that's because GOD wanted it to be. And You Can't Argue with God or Google (Godle, for short).
Now, as for an increase in bandwidth usage thanks to the new Google Image search, well, only a complete godless idiot wouldn't understand WHY that's happening. The Bejeezus! If Google is loading the high-res. image it has scraped from a website, then more bandwidth will be used -- WITHOUT THE SITE GETTING AN ACTUAL VISIT -- than if only a thumbnail were loaded (as was the case in the past).
Only a godless moron would fail to understand that. But again, if you don't want your bandwidth stolen via Google's Image Scrape -- er, Image Search, well get your images and your site DEINDEXED!!!. Oh, but you'll then disappear from searches, won't you? Too @$%@#% bad. You DESERVE to disappear from the Web, from the World, from the Universe if you refuse THE HONOR of having your content scraped and stolen by THE GREAT GOOGLE.
Enough said! GOOGLE, please SHOW US THE WAY!!!! ENLIGHTEN US!!!!! GUIDE US!!!!! Thank you.
Nobody uses Bung so no one has complained about their "better image search" function.
That makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
I see you do not understand how the web works.
For anyone to actually see the images you post, they have to download them onto their machine. Hence it is not stealing.
Even if, someone like a photo well enough to use it elsewhere, it is still not stealing: it is copyright infringement.
Perhaps you should have done some thinking before posting your amazingly ignorant drivel.
Are you claiming that a shiity site can't have one or more not shitty pictures? If so, you are a retard of epic proportions.
Of course not, since this is a discussion, it makes reading sense. If you want fucking sense, you'll have to fuck. But not me, I'm spoken for.