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

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.

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.

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: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.