Google Images' New (Bing-like) Layout

[levo]

Clicking on images now opens a layer with the larger image and a link to the page.

[img844.imageshack.us...]

[mssfldt]

I think we shouldn't block Googlebot now. First we have to fight and discuss. In Germany we did some trouble in our blogs and the first big news-sites began to think and write about it.

I argue this way: imagine Google announces an update in the websearch. When you click on a search-result a layer opens and you can read the whole article on the google result page. At the end of the article you can find a link to the source. Of course this is really user-friendly. You have not to wait for loading the source-page, perhaps with spammy ads in a waste layout.

This is exactly what Google now does with images. Stealing content and declare it as "user-friendly".

There was an unwritten agreement between Google and the image-owners: we gave the content to make Google's image search great - and Google gives us back the visitors. But now Google has brocken this agreement - they want it all. We, creatives, photographers, artist and so on, we just want to welcome the visitors on our pages, with the images embedded in our design, with the option to motivate users to have a look on our other works - because it's our content what people can find on Google. It's our option to say if we want to monetize these images or not.

It is a dramatic change in whats Google's goal. They are not longer a "search engine" - Google became a "find engine". Weather, Flight, Shopping, Knowledge graph and now image-search; Google tries to include as many contents as they could. It's our job to tell the people: stop, this is our content! Google is a search-engine, not a "content-engine"!

I hope many of us go out and tell it to other people. Because we are right!
Good luck, Martin

[edited by: mssfldt at 11:32 pm (utc) on Jan 28, 2013]

[zeus]

matrix_jan - with your solution Bing is the same which is also ok. With google its now so that some images show, but you can not click them other dont show, just the image box, I think I like that, it looks like google has a problem with there google image then.

[keyplyr]

BTW - users coming from Bing search results that carry that referrer will see your site without images. I doubt this is what you want.

Nope, the landing page is referred by bing not the images.

@ matrix_jan - Ah yes :) I was looking at hits from the bot itself.

I don't block the bots either. Instead I'm in discussions with both of them as to why they are not supporting the X-Robots-Tag: noindex header. And I also have anti-hot-linking that switches the file to an advert for my site which is showing in both Google & Bing Image results when you click-through to the larger image. But I don't think this tactic recovers the lost traffic.

[matrix_jan]

The thing is that google started to use https even for logged-off users. And the problem with https is that it sends no referral data :-/ So the images are being stolen and the server thinks they are just direct requests.

@mssfldt

You're right, this is theft, pure theft. This is wrong, and something must be done to stop it.

[helleborine]

I'm afraid nothing will happen.

Most amateur webmasters don't know anything about such things and don't care.

That's a lot of content that Pinterest/Bing/Google can infringe upon without having to worry at all.

There will be a few, like me, that have gone from 10,000 image referrals per month to 100, who will make the decision to completely exclude image searches.

I'm blocking them in robots.txt and .htaccess.

[Thaparian]

If only all the webmasters had a union, and they all blocked Google whenever Google made an unethical move.

If you're going to block Google, it's not going to matter to Google, and you'll lose your traffic.

1% of the webmasters will block Google? Maybe much less.

I wish there was union of webmasters and webmasters had to do whatever the union decided.

I used to love Google. Not anymore.

[dhaliwal]

It's our job to tell the people: stop, this is our content! Google is a search-engine, not a "content-engine"!

completely agree with the whole comment.

[dhaliwal]

i am not sure if moderators here will allow this message to remain here.

But, in my opinion, we should carry on this discussion in Google Images or Google Search support message board.

Thats one place where they will surely see our comments.

[keyplyr]

we should carry on this discussion in Google Images or Google Search support message board.

Thats one place where they will surely see our comments.

Google Guy and other Google people read this board. IMO they read the New, Faster, Improved Image Search On Bing [webmasterworld.com] thread that had some bragging about frame-braking methods (some of them from me) still working on Google Image Search... and voila, we now have this.

[dhaliwal]

@keyplyr
I haven't seen Googleguy responding for quite some time. If you see profile
[webmasterworld.com...]
Last Post:July 24, 2008
Maybe they are not revealing their identity anymore and are sneaking around.

If they frame their policies based on what people are discussing on WebmasterWorld and what people are talking about Bing, i think that company doesn't have any solid strategy.

Such decisions are usually taken at higher level and not by visiting forums. For sure, they have done it as they saw that there wasn't much reaction to Bing's policy of stealing images.

Anyway, i felt it will be good to discuss it on Google's forum as well. Parallel to this discussion here.

[gbk666]

Hello everyone, gbk from Germany here.

I build up a website about art with around 15k images. I had 3200 unique visitors last thursday and from than on it went down more and more. Yesterday to 1600.

It is a hobby site, one i was very dedicated to build up, i formed a community (outside of the site) and got the strong support of many artists who created art for specific themes. My site was even mentioned on big blogs and portals like eventhubs or kotaku and a lot more

Today it is 10:35 am here and only around 450 people were online yet..thats what i had normally in 2 hours.

I took a look and saw what happend...images which were seen 600 times a day are down to 50 or less views now.

The artworks can be seen on google..yeah hotlinked from my site without showing any of the content of my site.

What are the google users doing? Not visiting the site anymore..they stay on google.

Congratulations google, you will earn a ton more profit i guess.

I disallowed google and bing as well to show any images now..if nobody watches my site anymore ..why would i allow google to steal the traffic and hotlink the images?

I have the feeling that nothing will change anyway, but who knows..maybe it WILL have an impact if more and more of us are not supporting google with free images.

I am in the lucky position that it was just a hobby site and not one i need for my daily water and bread ;) But i worked so damn many hours on this site and build up some truly great things there with the help of many artists that this move by google hit me / us like a big kick into the stomach.

I am sure there can be small solutions like disallowing google to display big images which could be in a different folder than thumbs..but that would mean a ton of work and well..who knows what google is doing next?

[zeus]

gbk666 - yes the new layout has also come to europe now, so soon we will hear every single webmaster complaining about this, some of my sites has lost 95% image visits. I have also blocked them with htaccess and on one site I want to experiment with other solutions, so they dont show the big images.

[gbk666]

The most of my Traffic comes from the USA, Canada and even Mexico so i felt the outcome of the Traffic Image-Theft Update already.

Don't hesitate to share any solutions with us if you find one :-)

[dhaliwal]

I guess by now, it has been rolled out everywhere.

I see it in US, in Asia and also in Europe already.

[zeus]

Europe will not accept this, thats for sure.

[gbk666]

At least here in Germany there will be lawsuits most likely since the current image search violates the German copyright laws which are stronger than in most parts of the world i believe. But will Google even care?

[popac]

Google knows exactly what works....
Possible scenario:
After this move with images they will simple compare data before and after change and with next panda / penguin update (or few updates) they will wipe out and degrade all the sites that have relied on the pictures...except biggest and well known players.

After that, if you searching for some images, you will see watermarked stock photos, original Getty images (thumbs), author works from personal websites and other images which would you need to pay before use.

Maybe I'm wrong but... all moves from search engines (from 2008) tell me I'm right.
Whether someone agrees with me?

[dhaliwal]

@gbk666
there should be lawsuits everywhere against this move. If they have to face lawsuits, they will have no option but to care.

Most of the changes Google has made in the past, were not unlawful as those were the changes in rankings and algorithms.

What they have done this time is different. They have done copyright violation.

[zeus]

As said I have this against Bing

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} bing.com
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} BingPreview
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

With this they dont show any full resolution image and when clicking the image they get to a error page, where I have then placed a redirect on my error page, so they come to my site. This somehow dont work with google.

[dhaliwal]

@zeus

I don't see blocking them at the moment as a good option. Removing the content from their engines means losing ranking as well.

If they change their system again, the site won't be able to get back the same rankings again (at least, it won't be that easy to reach the same spot).

[zeus]

dhaliwal - it is only the images. Also I have done some testing some month ago, where I removed all my images with WMT and then added those 6 month later, all images where there within 3 days on google image. Ranking will not be effected. Also google image is not worth the bandwidth, so why give google free content without getting anything back.

[dhaliwal]

btw, shouldn't Bing blame Google for copying their idea :D

@zeus
Its good to see that rankings can be back again. I will consider this as well then. Have to disallow Google from stealing images and making me pay for bandwidth.

[zeus]

People really starts today to notice there huge decline in visits, which first started a week ago in the US.

[gbk666]

The best were the reactions by the average joe's when i brought up the topic to a big community of well..normal people who have nothing to do with webmasters

Lemme show you some of the best comments:

"Earn your pageviews, you lazy bum."

"Ahem. “The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two.

The results will also show more information about the image including the size, domain name and the webpage the image has come from. In early tests, Google apparently reported an increase in click-through after making this extra information more prominent."

I don't think you did your research. I think you saw something and flipped out."

"Oh no, your crap isn't as popular as you thought it was? People don't CARE about visiting your page? People don't WANT to see this stuff?

People don't WANT to look at the webpage that some image is hosted on?

Oh, that's so horrible.

(This is me STILL NOT CARING)

If they WANT TO THEY WILL. Maybe you should give them a reason to check your page out instead of whining that you aren't getting fake pageviews from people who just wanted to look at your picture."

"Google owes you nothing. If anything, I would bet a lot of your visitors didn't really look around on your site much but were just looking at the images. More than likely, Google is trying to beef up browsing security by having websites not load (therefore, only the image can load and not something malicious.)"

"You know they give you like 4 ways to see the webpage that image comes from, too, instead of just one.

Perhaps you should read some actual press releases instead of jumping on the 'gzomg' bandwagon.

Five seconds of research tells you how the search actually works."


"They don't owe you anything. You don't pay them for those visitors. And, quite frankly, as a person who uses google image search, I don't particularly want to visit every damn website for an image I click on because I don't know what's on it.. So, in the real world this hot linking is more user friendly. Go google!"

"So effectively you were relying on google images as free advertising? No such thing as a free lunch, boy!"

"Google owes no responsibility to you. If it wasn't for google, we wouldn't have the internet as we know it."

Motivating, eh?

[levo]

Motivating, eh?

Apparently shameless spins do work on some people.

[zeus]

They dont get that you give google content, if we webmasters did not give them content there would not be a google.

[gbk666]

Yup. Seems like some believe that images are growing on trees and are no reason to visit's one website lol.

I got other comments too though, not only negative ones, but those were sadly in the majority


"I've checked this and I don't like it. It's the hotlinking that offends me. Linking directly to the image, instead of the page it resides on. Don't some web hosts have hotlink protection? Wouldn't it work? I don't think it is. I don't get it.

The hotlinking is not right. That's one of those rules of the Internet. *shakes fist at Google*"

"Oh that explains what was going on with the google image search. Personally, I find it annoying (not just from an artist's standpoint) but from a user of google image search, I don't like the interface and find it clunky (and this is my opinion from 2 days of using it without knowing was the context was- I'm not from the US either, must be a NA thing).

Effectively on first glance it seems much the same except the tags associated with the image is gone, you just get the page address if you hover over the image, that and the date released which is pretty boring for most purposes. I liked the tags to make sure (or at least be more likely) something was what you were looking for if you have no idea what that thing might look like- for example if you're googling something like e.coli you might know WHAT that is, but you might not have any idea how that looks compaired to say, salmonella and you might get pictures of both on a google image search. Now you pretty much have to go to the page and read the associated caption with the image to find out if the picture is infact what you're after. Lazyness says that there will probably be an increase of wrong captioned images floating around due to people being too lazy to do this and just grabbing the first picture they find on google.

The positive to this is if the image in question is on a site you WOULDN'T want to visit it lets you bypass the float-over on the source webpage. When you click on the image you get two options- visit source page and view full image.

I imagine for a webmaster this might decrease ad profits (if you get ad viewing revenue from people when they're in the page float-over) however I think that it means that whatever number of views you get is much more representitive of "true" views.

Whatever number you're getting are from people who truely visit your website and browse, not just people who get sent there and then click on "view full image," save it, and then close the window without ever actually looking at your site. You do loose some of the curioustiy effect by getting a little bit of a preview though which will likely drop real views.

TL;DR: This is actually pretty similar to the system thats been in place on things like the iPad for a while now. I personally don't like it as a image search user since its clunky and makes my life more difficult on finding information about the image without having to visit every page. Similarily it will likely keep lazy people from checking their sources and so a lot more improperly described images will be floating around. I imagine a lot of the lost "views" are probably superficial coming from people who are only there to click "view full image" before closing the window, but it will likely hurt ad revenue and cause a drop in real views by not offering a potentially interesting preview of the page to people doing image searches. Main positive? Avoiding having to load a sketchy website to get an image."

"Damn, I did not know of this and yeah, right away I thought this is for their own profits on ads...
Essentially, what they're doing is beyond image search and it's about stealing content and place it on their own platform so they get their profit on other sites expenses. As if it wasn't bad enough when normal websites steals our work on the images, now google will do it themselves. No wonder how every schmuck with an internet connection thinks that it's ok to steal work from the internet without any consecuence, one of the biggest companies on the planet does it themselves."

"This is terrible. Google is hogging all the attention for itself and barely letting any room for anyone else. lol power hungry jerks..."

"That's a shocking move from google, i personally use image search all the time, I think that'll change if they fully implement that."

[dhaliwal]

No one likes advertisements on TV or Online websites. But, thats the only way a TV or Web publisher makes money.

The users want to enjoy free images and don't want to visit websites.
Same way, Web publishers don't want to provide free images.

So, if you want images, you must visit my website.

Google is stealing images and providing it to online users.

This should be stopped.

[helleborine]

What I realized is that the old "image-hover" over the website that has been in place for the past couple of years is what killed my Google Images traffic in the first place.

Google is just adding insult to injury, now, you know?

I'M QUITE ANGRY that Google isn't offering webmasters any suitable alternative.

[nicolass]

They earn money on our content...they build empire on our content..If all webmaster put google in disallow then goolge will be empty hole! They need to respect webmasters not to create PANDA and to fight "content farm" coz they are biggest content farm on whole internet.

All webmasters need block google for 7 days...then they will again start to respect and to remember who feed their workers and their empire.