levo - 4:31 pm on Jan 25, 2013 (gmt 0)

Can anyone confirm that the full-size view hotlinks the image from the source server rather than using a cached copy from Google's servers? I can't seem to access the new Images version yet.

Shows a cached version first (upscaled and fuzzy), loads the larger image in the background from the source server. Google keeps the visitor, we pay for the bandwidth.

Edit: Also loads the larger version of the previous and the next image results (from source server).

Edit2: If the visitor is using https, there is no referer for image request. For http, the referer is 'http://www.google.com/blank.html'