Problems with Google Image Search

Image search has more images and poorer results

[iridiax]

Google Image Search has gotten really poor recently, especially for more obscure terms like species scientific names, which are things I often search for to help me identify things. It used to be that some image searches turned up zero to only a few results, but these results were usually very accurate. Now, an image search for a scientific name (especially a less common one) will return any image from a page where that name is mentioned, and usually most of these images are of something other than what I was searching for... I search for a species of plant and I get hundreds of bizarre image results to wade through, mostly consisting of banner images, navigation buttons, graphs, and photos of objects, humans, and other, often totally unrelated species.

I think that Google must have changed their algorithm to take on-page and surrounding text into major account because so many images on the web lack proper file names, alt text and/or title text, but this has just increased their false positive rates to really annoying levels. For some of my image searches, it's 1% correct, 99% incorrect.

Another problem that Google Image Search has is the duplicate indexing of hotlinked images. An Adsense-supported website has been using one of Google's own search APIs to get the top image result from their image search, and this website then inline displays the full-sized original image (hotlinks from each original website without permission) on their webpages. Despite the fact that the image and the image's web address are the same and both already exist in the Google Image Search database, Google reindexes the hotlinked images for a second time, except this time as now belonging to the hotlinker's pages!

For my own websites, I give my images proper file names and alt text (and often title text as well), and this seems to help them rank quite well, but it also helped get a number of them reindexed for this hotlinker (ugh).

[tedster]

I've noticed the same thing. I have a client who uses images of plants and animals identified by their species, genus, family and so on. Knowing for sure that we have the right image tied to the exactly right name is sometimes a challenge -- and image search was very valuable as a double check.

But right now, it's as if I am looking for an apple -- but there's a page with a picture of a dog and also the word apple somewhere. I get a picture of a dog.

Also problematic in a similar way is a search for a person's photo, using their name in quotes. You can easily end up with some one else's photo and previously this was a lot less common.

[zeus]

I think its good they finaly do not filter EVERYTHING with there Moderate SafeSearch is on, they fixed that in the last update, about the results, hmm I dont think they are that bad.

[Achernar]

I see poor results too for about 4-5 months.
Before, the results where still on focus after the 5th result page. Now it becomes crap about there (if not right from the first page).

[piatkow]

I don't bother with image search any more, either trying to get my pics in, or for my own serarches. Yahoo seems to give far more relevant results.

With G my site goes in and out every few weeks and test searches that should produce two oe three relevant pages (hopefully with my pix first) go totally off topic about half way down page 1.

[piney]

What I think is aggravating when doing a species' scientific name search (using image search) is this: when there is one image on the web page of that species but there are also other images on the same page, google will include those other images in the results, too. The first image in the results is usually the species, but the rest of the images are not, and yet they're there in the results. Why include more than one image from each page when the other images don't have the search term very close to them?

Also, I presume that .edu sites tend to have better PR, inherently, so instead of these unrelated images being at the bottom of the results, they are next to or within a few spots from the actual species image.

[Pico_Train]

I don't think they are that bad. Image results can also be optimised for. How you do it...well that's a special sauce but the same principles of SEO apply to images.