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."

Comments

does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

"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"?

Re:does not compute

[Georules]

More people being linked directly to the high resolution image, but less people actually visiting the website. This isn't really that confusing.

Re:does not compute

[Dancindan84]

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."

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:does not compute

[um... Lucas]

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.

Re:does not compute

[m1ndcrash]

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]

Re:does not compute

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, too easy.

Re:does not compute

[icebike]

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.

Re:does not compute

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:does not compute

[miserere nobis]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

Samuel T. Jackson? Does he pity the fool who says "what" again?

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[ScentCone]

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.

And nowhere does it explain how you can have decreased traffic but increased bandwidth usage. Because it's not possible.

Oh, I get it now, You're a moron. You don't understand the difference between thumbnail images and higher-resolution files. Does it physically hurt to sound like such a jackass while also being so uninformed?

Re:does not compute

[Dancindan84]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Georules]

Ah, point taken.

Re:does not compute

[sjames]

Then why do you like the image so much? It is, after all, part of their 'shitty' website.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

He ain't getting on no plane, with or without snakes. In fairness, I've been ill. :)

Re:does not compute

[msheekhah]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.

Strangely, being a photographer, my webpage is packed full of photographs and not ads. So, it would be nice if somebody would actually look at my webpage to see who's photos they are stealing, so they will know where to come back to steal more.

So, perhaps some thinking should happen after you read the article and before you put up your mindless snide comebacks.

Yea, too lazy to log in to reply to your "interesting" dribble.

Re:does not compute

[tbird81]

You have the option not to appear in the search listings. Perhaps try that, that will reduce people stealing your bandwidth.

Re:does not compute

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

A high resolution image can easily take up more data than HTML fluff and a thumbnail.

Re:does not compute

[icebike]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

"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...

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[um... Lucas]

>> 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.

Re:does not compute

[um... Lucas]

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.

Re:does not compute

[um... Lucas]

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.

Re:does not compute

[um... Lucas]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Golddess]

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?

Re:does not compute

[miserere nobis]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Ford Prefect]

Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Stiletto]

What's "Bing"?

Re:does not compute

[Stiletto]

Am I the only person amused by the concept of "stealing" something from a website that makes it publicly available?

Re:does not compute

[Stiletto]

$ curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/deep/link/path/yourimage.jpg -o yourimage.jpg

Re:does not compute

[Stiletto]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Stiletto]

So, use robots.txt to remove yourself from their search listings. Problem solved.

Re:does not compute

[fluffy99]

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.

Re:does not compute

[ohnocitizen]

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.

Re:does not compute

[xenobyte]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[xenobyte]

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.

Re:does not compute

[discord5]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

if you don't want to allow hotlinking directly to the image, then configure your server to disallow the hotlinking, problem solved

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[ScentCone]

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.

Re:does not compute

[alexo]

What's "Bing"?

A search engine that doesn't forcefully censor the results of your searches.

Re:does not compute

[PhxBlue]

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?

Re:does not compute

[Shagg]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Ford Prefect]

You don't embed that in the EXIF information?

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.)

Re:does not compute

[chrismcb]

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.

Re:does not compute

[chrismcb]

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.

Re:does not compute

[chrismcb]

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.

Re:does not compute

[PaladinAlpha]

And copies results from Google.

Re:does not compute

[miserere nobis]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Sigg3.net]

Bing for 100$.

What is the last name of the Chandler character in the insanely popular sitcom called Friends?

Re:does not compute

[Sigg3.net]

Errrrr!

Right question: What's the noise the Machine that goes Bing! makes?

Re:does not compute

[alexo]

Even if that was true, why should I care as long as I get better results?

Re:does not compute

[cynyr]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody uses Bung so no one has complained about their "better image search" function.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Re:does not compute

[vilanye]

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.

Re:does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:does not compute

[sjames]

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.

The system works!

[noh8rz10]

The system works! The capitalist system, that is. For a decade google images was stuck in some sort of web 2.0 time warp. Then bing images gave it a shock to the system with intelligent scrolling and a more intuitive experience. Hre is the response, which is win win for all users. Microsoft, the ball is in your court!

What?

[rudy_wayne]

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?

Re:What?

[0123456]

In fact, it causes reduced bandwidth usage because you don't have to download some stupid ad-filled (and possibly malware-infested) web page that you don't want to see, the way the old image search did.

If they don't like it, block any requests with a Google referrer string.

Re:What?

[icebike]

In fact, it causes reduced bandwidth usage because you don't have to download some stupid ad-filled (and possibly malware-infested) web page that you don't want to see, the way the old image search did.

If they don't like it, block any requests with a Google referrer string.

This has been answered in the branch above. You can easily exceed your hosted bandwidth quota (with zero ad-generated revenue) by having a high-rez photo from your site pop up in a google image search, especially in a situation where something you have on file becames the topic of a high number of searches.
Even if you don't serve that photo normally on your web pages, but simply provide a button or thumbnail to click for the small percentage of viewers that want to see the high-res.

Most visitors don't click the high-rez button or thumbnail. The few that do, don't matter. Until Google indexes it, then all bets are off.

Some (failed) web designers only put the high-rez image in, then shrink it into a box via the html IMG tag. (Then they wonder why people complain that their web loads slowly). These guys would see very little difference in this case, unless of course Google sees a surge of searches that just happen to find your Nattily Portman collection.

Re:What?

[The MAZZTer]

If you don't want Google or anyone else to hotlink your images, it's fairly easy to set up hotlink protection.

Re:What?

[0123456]

This has been answered in the branch above. You can easily exceed your hosted bandwidth quota (with zero ad-generated revenue) by having a high-rez photo from your site pop up in a google image search, especially in a situation where something you have on file becames the topic of a high number of searches.

And that was answered in my comment above. If you don't want people using image search, block them.

Re:What?

[sjames]

Because google goes directly to the full sized image, not the thumbnail on the web page. Grabbing the image directly creates no impressions, so the bandwidth burned per impression shoots up.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd go further than this, honestly, I'm sick of people whining about this sort of thing.

The internet was created for one purpose - information sharing, if you don't want your information shared then get it off the web, otherwise don't cry when it is shared.

Yes that may mean there's a cost to you, in terms of hosting, but that's part of what the web spirit always was - that people share information for free at their time and expense, or as part of their employment (i.e. academics sharing data).

I'm sick of these people who believe they have a god given right to make money from the web and deserve legal protection as such. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to make money, but making money should be upto you to figure out without expecting the whole of the purpose and intent of the web and it's design to revolve around what you want.

Booohooo, people can link to content on your site. Get over it, that's how it was designed, that's how it was meant to be, don't like it? Then stick your content behind some passworded paywall or whatever, if it's on the public web it should be fair game, that's the whole point of it. It's the same as the newspapers whinging about Google quoting and linking their content - again, Google is doing nothing wrong, it's using the web EXACTLY as it was intended, if they don't like it they should get off the web and see how that suits them.

Re:What?

[Sigg3.net]

Happens a lot in ornithologist groups' websites: "chicks with cocks" and hi-res pictures of "tits in the spring" aso.

What?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out. It is the non-evil thing to do.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The intent of the web does not supersede copyright law.

It looks and works great!

[game kid]

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).

Re:It looks and works great!

[icebike]

Well at least it now works on Android. The prior version was just about impossible to use on Android.

Re:It looks and works great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You just blew my mind trying to figure out who you're shilling for.

Two words

[Anonymous Coward]

Referrer goatse

Solves a annoying problem.

[stevenh2]

Some websites use a annoying script that redirects people when they click a image.

Re:Solves a annoying problem.

[icebike]

Yeah, they want you to go their payment page and sign up for unlimited access.

Re:Solves a annoying problem.

[Cito]

this is why i never click the image, if it's the size i want I right click -> Copy image

then paste into my pirated photoshop

to fuck with as I please

what's next people whining to photoshop to remove content aware delete that lets me remove their little watermarks and reuse for my own purposes?

sheesh

Re:Solves a annoying problem.

[tbird81]

Exactly.

And what do you do with your dewatermarked photo? You stick your own watermark on it, place the picture on a gallery website, stick tonnes of ads on it, then SEO and submit to Google and spam your url everywhere to get it listed.

It's the circle of life.

Re:Solves a annoying problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the cut of your jib son.

Re:Solves a annoying problem.

[L4m3rthanyou]

Agreed, but I think this will only make the problem worse, as increased use of referrer checking will redirect users from Google Images to some cheesy splash-page that serves nothing but ads.

I liked the "original context" feature with the source page displayed in a frame. I guess the change was inevitable though, it seemed like more and more asshat webmasters were using those damn "break out of frames" scripts, derailing the image search. Half the time the page was some poorly-optimized blog, so the image I was looking for was nowhere to be found on the page!

Re:Solves a annoying problem.

[tbird81]

Thank you.

I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[future assassin]

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?

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[VortexCortex]

So, your answer is that because google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution in most cases, that everyone else on the web should go to Google and opt out of their caching system? Site owners are in coorperation with google, we like google when they don't do fucked up illegal things... We see thumbnails as "fair use", maybe. We don't mind much as long as the users end up on our site to see the image. Google understands advert revenue funded websites... They are one. So, it's really hard to understand users who want free stuff saying that we have to change our business practices, and maybe not even give them free stuff (or make it harder to find free stuff) simply because a bigger free stuff provider decides they can get away with infringing copyrights of everyone.

Your solution is not a solution. A real solution will be to address the issues. Hell, maybe while google is processing the images to reduce their resolution and run heuristic matching algorithms for their other-sizes and search terms feature, they can water-mark them with the domain name of the site they downloaded the image from.

Or, let's simply turn your moronic suggestion on it's ear. Why don't we all just say: Hey Google, If you want the feature to work that way, you needed to GET PERMISSION FROM EVERYONE BEFORE INFRINGING THEIR COPYRIGHTS. Fuck you and your opt-out "let's piss off everyone, then apologize until we get our way", Facebook feature roll-out model.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[LocalH]

google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution

They've done no such thing. They distribute a smaller thumbnail, and link directly to the original.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[msheekhah]

Google is acting on feedback from ITS customers. You are not its customers. If you want to protect your context, then do a little research and take care of it. It's not difficult. The information is freely available on the internet how to block hotlinking. And think of the logistics, google will never ask site owners what they want. There are too many of you and not enough of them. That's why you have the option to keep Google off your site. Use it.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[TapeCutter]

This is competition 101 - adapt your site to the new environment or it will die.

The solution is a simple technical one that was designed for this exact purpose, ie: don't serve the images unless the referrer is your own site. The only problem here is your unwillingness to modify YOUR site to meet YOUR requirements.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

They reproduce a smaller thumbnail, hotlink to the original, and also provide a link directly to it.

Whether you consider the last two points to be identical or not depends on whether you take a webpage as a published entity (what you see) or as a collage of entities generated locally by the browser (how it's done). In the US, at least, hotlinking is *not* considered illegal (Perfect 10 vs Amazon). Google was found non-infringing over thumbnails in the same case, since their use was considered transformative.

But I believe the point remains - although it's not illegal, it's still a douche move, like Eric Schmidt arrogantly handwaving away Google's huge tax avoidance scams as "capitalism."

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Blakey Rat]

In a lot of cases you don't have permission to post "the original" without a corresponding copyright notice on the page. In that case, linking directly to the image without displaying the copyright notice is a copyright violation on Google's part. Even most Creative Common licenses have that particular term.

Google's doing this because they know they can get away with it. But until copyright reform is enacted, however, they're violating the copyright of thousands of artists at this very moment.

That's not right.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a small point of confusion here. No, they are not - if you are using Google image search to look for images, then you are not one of Google's customers, you are in fact what they are selling.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Savage-Rabbit]

google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution

They've done no such thing. They distribute a smaller thumbnail, and link directly to the original.

Oh hell, I have a little Karma to burn...

I want Google to index my website to so that it is discoverable but I also want the search results to contain just enough data to induce people to visit my site looking for more. I suppose that as the site owner I could just block Google completely from indexing my site as other people here have suggested. That might work if Google was just one of 20 search engines and had, say, a 12% market share. Unfortunately Google has a hugely dominant 90% market share while Google's competitors (read: Bing) have to content them selves with the leftovers which makes Google's competitors unlikely to generate the kind of traffic I need for my site. So blocking Google is not really an option. One way to defeat this kind of leeching would be to serve only small images to requests coming from Google domains to try and to induce people to visit my site. It would be a bit of work, and you'd have to keep a constant eye on the logs over incoming requests because Google is sure to try and weasel it's way around your defences, but at least you'd get the satisfaction of making life a little harder for Google's engineers and maybe even screwing Google out of a bit of money in the process.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd also be the first to complain when your page rank goes down because Google pulls the search to your website. Right next to the picture is the link to the website, so if I'm interested in finding more information on random pictures I can visit your website. As a consumer I want to find the picture I'm looking for quickly and move on. If I want to find out what that picture was and I see it on the search then I click the website and come and visit. To search better the higher the resolution the better the search will be, but if Google removed the ability to download the link then I will just use Snipping Tool in Windows 7 to get the picture.

Here is a solution why don't you watermark your own pictures so that when someone borrows your picture other then when Google promotes it then you will have the proof.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[stephanruby]

Hey Google, If you want the feature to work that way, you needed to GET PERMISSION FROM EVERYONE BEFORE INFRINGING THEIR COPYRIGHTS. Fuck you and your opt-out "let's piss off everyone, then apologize until we get our way", Facebook feature roll-out model.

This was tried before. It just wasn't practical at all. If search engines had waited until they got permission from everyone before they could index everyone's public content, most public government sites, most public newspaper sites, most public personal web sites, etc. would have been excluded by default.

The advantage and the problem with the http protocol is that it's copy-agnostic. And if you really want to control the dissemination of your content, you better put it behind a wall of some kind. Don't post it publicly and then complain that people/bots made copies of it. That just goes against the nature of the public internet.

Also, don't imply that you need to set a different opt-out text/xml file for each search engine. If you do an opt-out for Google, it will work equally well for other search engines. And doing a granular optout is actually very little work to do for someone who's trying to make money from their own web site.

And finally, please don't try to take advantage of the public nature of the public internet and then complain about that very nature. The internet was created for sharing content. There is a reason you're on the public decentralized internet now, and not on the privately centralized walled garden of AOL, Prodigy, or Minitel.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha since when has google cared about obeying robots.txt ? But you are right, perhaps every webmaster in the world should block both googlebot and their image bot.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[xenobyte]

In a lot of cases you don't have permission to post "the original" without a corresponding copyright notice on the page. In that case, linking directly to the image without displaying the copyright notice is a copyright violation on Google's part. Even most Creative Common licenses have that particular term.

Isn't the copyright notice also listed in the image's metadata, which is still available if you save Google's copy of the image?

If yes, there's no violation. It's not a legal impairment that you require a tool to read it; fine print on contracts have been equally binding for centuries and this is no different.

Besides, fair use of an image has always been legal, and online re-use of online images have been ruled fair use many times. As long as you don't claim ownership, your own copyright or similar, or use it commercially, and credit the source, it's fair use.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want to allow hotlinking off the full-sized images, then fucking set up your site to disallow it.

that means:
- if you have page A containing image A
- whenever you have a request for image A where the referer is not page A, redirect the request to page A

there, you've just forced everyone to see your image in the context it was designed for
(as an aside do not redirect all hotlinks to your main page, that doesn't help the visitor see your image in context)

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

oh for gods sake!

do either of the following:
- block googlebot or googlebot-image from indexing whatever you don't want hotlinked
- change your server setup so that for everything you don't want hotlinked it checks the referer and if it's not your site it redirects to whatever page that piece of content would normally appear in.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

But you fail to see the point...

There is a reason to use a robot file ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard ) ... This is ment to say what and what not crawlers can index.. If a site-owner does not want it's site to be indexed then use it... If they want it to be indexed then dont use it... If they only want some content to be indexed then configure it to only allow wanted things to be indexed...

Putting something on a webserver it to publish it without limitations to it's usage, well maybe with the exception that you are not allowed to make copies of it.. If they want to limit the way the content should be used they need to publish those limitations in any of the standardized ways.. including a link to another page or other page content is not breaking any copyrights since it was their choice to publish it without limitations.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[AmiMoJo]

That's not what the sites want. They like the older system where their site was displayed along side the image, so they at least get some exposure. They want people to find images on their sites and visit them, or at least see their logo and advertising. Google took away the site preview feature though now you just get a black page with the imagine in the middle and a link.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Anonymous Coward]

So, your answer is that because google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution in most cases, that everyone else on the web should go to Google and opt out of their caching system?

YES. And that would be the end of it. It's not an entitlement that your page even be seen. Nor should it be. If Google (or ANY other web crawler) wants to index your page, and you consent with either specifying a valid robots.txt or without one, that's your fault.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[PhxBlue]

So, your answer is that because google has decided it has the right to redistribute copyrighted images in full resolution in most cases, that everyone else on the web should go to Google and opt out of their caching system?

As about 20 other people have pointed out, that's not really what Google's doing. The full-resolution images are hotlinked from Google image search. Ironically, it would be easier on site owners if Google were directly lifting the high-resolution images, but ... copyright.

Why don't we all just say: Hey Google, If you want the feature to work that way, you needed to GET PERMISSION FROM EVERYONE BEFORE INFRINGING THEIR COPYRIGHTS.

I think this is maybe a good place to ask, why did you publish the content in the first place?

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Shagg]

1) You want your content publicly accessible in order to increase your exposure.
2) You want to control who has access to your content (only those that visit your site and I assume view your ads).

Please pick one, you can't have both.

Re:I'm Sofa King We Tod Did

[Sigg3.net]

You're way off topic, but perhaps you're just trolling.

The fact of the matter is that robots.txt is a well-known convention that predates the Google image search, and was created to handle just these type of situations.

I should add 'moron' in there, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Now you know.

robots.txt

[swebster]

I think it still exists?

Re:robots.txt

[rudy_wayne]

I think it still exists?

It still exists. But, technically, can't your web crawler just ignore it?

Re:robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realise that copyright infringement was perfectly okay if the originating website forgets to put "Disallow: copyright infringement" in robots.txt. Live and learn!

Re:robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, a web crawler can ignore it, but Google behaves itself; and it's Google that we're talking about here.

Re:robots.txt

[fyngyrz]

Google does NOT behave itself. It ignores crawl speed, among other things.

Google does whatever the heck it wants. It's Google.

Re:robots.txt

[fatphil]

> Google does NOT behave itself.

It's also a bit dumb. It's been playing my webserver at a variant of reversi for the last 12 months (one of the links at the end of each game is to start a new game, which it duly follows...)

Re:robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, and other webcrawlers, SHOULDN'T behave themselves. Their job is to get a preview of what a website looks like to a user. If the website knows that they're a crawler, they might serve something different to what they would show to a user. Therefore, the crawlers should pretend to be users - as completely as possible - in order to get the real user-oriented content.

Re:robots.txt

[fyngyrz]

Here's the thing. Individual users (very) rarely hit tons of pages all at one time. If those pages involve server time -- say they involve DB lookups -- it doesn't take long before a big spider can do some real pipe-choking.

Google *should* obey the crawl-delay directive; there's no decent excuse whatsoever to not do so. A site that is perfectly adequate for it's legit users can be brought to its knees by a crawler that doesn't obey crawl-delay.

Google should fix this -- it's straight-up broken. The assumption that a site pays for enough bandwidth to work properly under normal load plus a ridiculous waterfall of almost-parallel accesses is abusive.

Re:robots.txt

[SuricouRaven]

But is it winning?

robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

robots.txt

What cunts.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But the worst problem is...

[Anonymous Coward]

They made it less likely to display porn. Now how am I supposed to view porn at work?

If It's Copyright That They're Worried About

[mk1004]

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.

Re:If It's Copyright That They're Worried About

[bobthesungeek76036]

I think websites owners want the entire Internet to be one big AOL and everyone has to go through a portal to get to content. Heaven forbid downloading some picture w/o seeing some crappy ad...

Re:If It's Copyright That They're Worried About

[Anonymous Coward]

Since images are automatically copyrighted, your suggestion might be common sense, but it does not change the legality of what Google are doing.

Re:If It's Copyright That They're Worried About

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you're referring to the Creative Commons Licenses.

https://creativecommons.org/

It's a set of pre-created licenses for works that can be redistributed, like BSD/MIT/GPL, except for content that isn't software. You can specify whether you want attribution, whether it can used commercially, whether it must be copyleft, and whether modifications can be redistributed.

Re:If It's Copyright That They're Worried About

[chrismcb]

Copyright works the other way around. Copyright is not an opt in, it is an opt out. So if you really want to implement the way you are suggesting google needs to see if it has a "public domain flag" And if its there link to the photo

Re:If It's Copyright That They're Worried About

[mk1004]

After thinking about it some more, I realized that most web sites have a copyright mark on each page. That would imply that all items, including images, are copyrighted. OTOH,placing a copyright notice implies that if you don't do so, your copyright claims are somehow diminished. Since IANAL, I have no clue how that all works out. But it seems clear that if a web page includes the copyright mark, and doesn't somehow indicate that images may be copied, then Google should probably link to the page.

Referer Header!

[TheNinjaroach]

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.

Re:Referer Header!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, modrewrite is your friend.

That worked fine already 10 years ago when MySpace users used direct links to pictures at our site. Quickest dent in bandwidth hogging was soon after I redirected any direct requests referring to pictures directory from myspace.com to that well known gaping arsehole that was so popular already that time. It didn't take them long to figure out what's going on and mass rewrite all requests to some local file that file not available :)

Re:Referer Header!

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, serve a hot link denied image as if it were the real image. To avoid easy OCR, make it captcha-style. When Google image search starts displaying a ton of those, they may start listening.

Re:Referer Header!

[ShaunC]

Heh. Some years ago, BlackPlanet.com (basically "MySpace for African-Americans" at the time) actually hotlinked an image on a site of mine into their templating system. It wasn't just random users, this pic was built straight into their publishing platform, meaning tens of thousands of users were selecting this particular image on my server to be part of the theme of their BlackPlanet page.

Didn't take them too long after my RewriteRule to rehost it on their own server.

Re:Referer Header!

[gmhowell]

Didn't take them too long after my RewriteRule to rehost it on their own server.

lemonparty.jpg served for those referred from their site?

Re:Referer Header!

[Anonymous Coward]

rewrite doesn't prevent Google's method. Google uses scripts to directly hotlink without a referrer. If you prevent hotlinks, then Google falls back to thumbnail (good), but if visitor visitos your page to see the full image - then visitor sees a cached version of your hotlink warning image instead (bad).

Simple

[bobthesungeek76036]

# cd
# cat - > robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
<crtl-D>
#

Problem solved!

Re:Simple

[fatphil]

Not just that, which is the brute force method, google themsleves are happy to tell you exactly how to block just images just for them (so your text content will still be scanned, and web searches will find you).

This story is just another "wah-wah-wah I'm stupid" rant. It's not even a rant, it's just a jibber.

Re:Simple

[gitano_dbs]

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /hires_images/

Re:Simple

[sdnoob]

simple. does the job. problem solved.

this is a non-issue.

Re:Simple

[Krojack]

You mean this? Prevent your images from appearing in Google search results.

BUT BUT THAT'S TO EASY!.... I need to vent my anger and bust out my lawyers! I should NOT have to protect my own property. Google should automatically know what's public domain and what's not. geeez.

This benefits my ecommerce site

[SimplyGeek]

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.

What's New?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's New?

[fyngyrz]

It isn't even just a button. Do your search, then sit back and tap the cursor keys on your keyboard, and you'll zip though tons of images in no time.

If this kind of image mining is a problem

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[lexman098]

Example (maybe slightly nsfw, could probably get away with it)

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiosity, then, how do you feel about ad blocking? You should be against it, to maintain consistency with your argument.

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[maztuhblastah]

If they weren't on your website, (or if they don't provide the header, an act to be widely discouraged)

Excuse me?

No, actually, it's not an act to be "widely discouraged". Why? Because I don't trust you. Shit, I run several large sites and I wouldn't want my users to trust me with that sort of thing. Ok, I can at least see a case for providing it for intra-site requests, but it's absolutely a bad thing from a privacy standpoint to tell every site where you were previously.

Plus, you know, what with Google serving their results over HTTPS, there's not going to be a ref. header for the subsequent request to your site. :)

Seriously though, HTTP_REFERRER should burn in a fire. It's right up there with SMTP: a vestige from a time when networks consisted of admins and users who generally could be trusted to do the right thing. Those days are over. Sorry.

Now sending a User Agent header... that's at least a *little* more defensible (though not much...)

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[fyngyrz]

The only ads that bother me are pop ups, and I don't ever serve those. I don't block ads myself, though I like to think I'm pretty quick to knock off a pop-up. Don't like pop-up menus either, come to that... if I didn't click on it, I don't want it to react. Hover menus are stupid, IMHO.

I actually think it's useful that they offer me things that I might actually want. Much more interesting than ads for things I'm not even remotely interested in. If I go look at monitors on Amazon, I see banners with monitors, swingarms, etc. for several days. Fine with me.

You know, if I put something in the commons one way or another, I try to be explicit about it, like my SDR software . I actually mean it to be free. But I do like earning an income, even it's its very small, from my web operations, and should an ad catch the eye of a visitor, and they click on it... that's fine with me. They don't have to click on an ad, and the content has value if you're into SDRs. If you're not into SDRs, I can't imagine why you'd be there anyway, lol.

I guess I feel that earning isn't evil, and particularly not so if the surfer gets something of real value. Contrariwise, I serve a lot of pages where no one clicks on anything, and in that case, I took a risk and I knew the bounds of it. Making sure images can't be deep mined defines what my risk is a little better, that's all. You want the image, you'll have to come get it.

I used to have a moderately heavy GIF animation on one of my sites, thing was *really* subject to deep mining. It was a trace of a diamond rotating, refraction and reflection zipping away. (here now) So I wrote a CGI that moved it every few hours, and put a note under it that basically said, if you want to use the image, save it, put it on your own site, and bless ya, but don't link to it here. You had to see the log of image misses to really understand how many people ignored the gift of the image, and just ate up my bandwidth.

One guy went so far as to watch the site with his *own* CGI, and follow the image around. So I wrote the appropriate apache esoterica, and when a request for that image came in from his site, I served him up his own... special... version. About 24 hours later, I looked, and he'd finally moved the animation to his own storage and was serving it himself.

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[fyngyrz]

Not a problem. No header, no pages, and off you go to somewhere else. You don't trust me -- then I don't trust you.

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

of course you can redirect ... but inside img src= it will be pointless.

Re:If this kind of image mining is a problem

[fyngyrz]

Although, I tell you what: You get HTTP_REFERER augmented or replaced with a YES-NO flag that tells me if the browser is making a request from within my site or without, and I'd stop requiring HTTP_REFERER entirely.

Or, have the browsers submit a blank HTTP_REFERER for anywhere but where you are. So if you hit me from elsewhere.com, I get a blank, but if you hit me from mysite.com, I get "mysite.com."

See, I don't care where you've been at all. What I care about is where you are.

Be careful, Google

[Cloud K]

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.

Re:Be careful, Google

[tbird81]

You can opt out.

Re:Be careful, Google

[Rockoon]

Yes, and the folks on slashdot are really big on opt-out instead of opt-in...

..oh wait.. no they fucking arent. The folks on slashdot fucking hate opt-out, and rightly fucking so.

Re:Be careful, Google

[BradleyUffner]

Yes, and the folks on slashdot are really big on opt-out instead of opt-in... ..oh wait.. no they fucking arent. The folks on slashdot fucking hate opt-out, and rightly fucking so.

Posting your content on a publicly accessible URL IS opt-in.

Re:Be careful, Google

[Cloud K]

.... oh.

In that case I don't understand what the fuss is. I guess nowadays we just assume that people are incapable of turning off things that they don't like (same goes for things like all the fuss about Ubuntu's Amazon search, which you can just uh... turn off.)

Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

Redirect to a black / porn image ...

Re:Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suggest a picture of a blood-engorged leech with the Google logo on its side. You could host it centrally and track Google users. No need to, they just enjoy being tracked that much (they use Google, after all)

if someone started a site called 'oogle'

[decora]

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.

Re:if someone started a site called 'oogle'

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Google offers a convenient and easy way to avoid it stealing your content. Just use robots.txt and drop yourself out.

Oh what, you don't want to? You actually can't say no to Google crawler, cause then you're out of the web itself? Tough luck, then. It seems you do benefit somehow from the situation afterall.

obviously not many web masters on /. anymore

[decora]

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.

^^ mod this up ^^

[ferret4]

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.

Is copyright that different for various art?

[Yakasha]

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.

Copyrighted contents ...

[Taco Cowboy]

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 ??

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Retard.. things are copywritten automatically when they are published. What you just suggested is - never publish anything online.

Your post is covered by copyright
Linux - copyright
slashdot's html - copyright

Do you know what copyright is?

Why is slashdot filled with retards these days.

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[Anonymous Coward]

why is it filled with assholes?

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow. "Retard.. things are copywritten.." ..."Do you know what a copyright is"
When I try to type copywritten, it get a red underline. My PC doesn't know what copywrite is.

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[Anonymous Coward]

because fuck ignorant fucks

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not understand.

If something is copyrighted why put it online

This is an amazingly childish misunderstanding of copyright and basic business. There is little to respond to except to say that you obviously are nowhere close to understanding even the simplest forces behind this issue.

Frankly, one of the main reasons we are pinned under such a authoritarian system of information control is proles like you.

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[alexo]

Retard.. things are copywritten (sic) automatically when they are published.

Why is slashdot filled with retards these days.

I think you got your answer.

Re:Copyrighted contents ...

[Shagg]

Exactly. They make something publicly accessible, and then complain when the public accesses it.

I can see both sides

[Miamicanes]

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.

Maybe I'm crazy but...

[mwn3d]

Didn't Google have direct image links before?

No webpage in the background

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:No webpage in the background

[issicus]

I hated the way they had it. when they changed it I thought "wow, google finally got it together" .

Brilliant

[Indigo]

Google just turned every other web site on the planet into MegaUpload. Sort of. "Don't, be evil" indeed.

Re:Brilliant

[xenobyte]

MegaUpload was not evil - or copyright-infringing, except in the warped minds of some very naive FBI agents...

Re:Brilliant

[Indigo]

Kind of late, but... Agree totally. I meant that Google's move, not MegaUpload, was evil. Although after spending time with the new image search, it seems more douchey (not showing the source page) than evil (which would be pretending that there was no source page). The UI makes it plain that the image is coming from somewhere else and gives you the option to see the page or go directly to the image, so while I'm not thrilled, I'll stand down from my earlier comment.

Sample?

[Antony T Curtis]

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.

Re:Sample?

[discord5]

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.

I think if you were a photographer looking to have such a feature you should just hire a reasonably competent webdeveloper for a day and have them setup such a thing for you. Can't be more than 20 lines of python/perl/php code really.

Re:Sample?

[Anonymous Coward]

adding a watermark is against copyright. just saying.

Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bad or good

[Skapare]

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.

I'm Sorry But...

[Zamphatta]

if these webmaster really believe that most people don't know about 'right click' & "save image as...", then they are living in lala-land.

Another example of feature creep

[Mononoke]

GIS worked just fine before they decided to "improve" it. Now I cannot turn "Safe search" off, and now I cannot quickly search for a particular image size.

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.

Re:Another example of feature creep

[jackb_guppy]

Do not worry about safe search it is broken too. I posted to Google a complaint that if you mispell the word COLD as COOLD it brings up X rated Amine even with SaveSearch ON.

Though I did find that Google does not page to enter complaints of there products. Just others using their products. (google+, Blogger,...)

Default image search still sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

robots.txt

[mnt]

Disallow: /images/ Poof, done.

Dear "user"

[thegarbz]

Dear user, if you don't like my shitty website, don't click on my shitty images.

Think Bigger Picture

[Anonymous Coward]

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
"the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: ...(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;"

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.

Re:Think Bigger Picture

[epSos-de]

I can confirm, that the traffic from image search is down by 20 percent. People are being forced out of business.

I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

A point of view from an entitled freeloader. Thanks. Obviously, you're the one who is ignorant about how copyright works.

I Need All the Help I Can Get

[carrier lost]

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

Shut up, Cry Baby!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Intuitiveness?

[chrismcb]

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.

Are people DERANGED??? Or Just STUPEED??

[Anonymous Coward]

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.