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...]

[zeus]

I can just recommend all to block them and get the word out to as many big images companies as possible. It dossent iven have to be a image related site, as long they have a few large images. Dont forget to mention Bing to.

[mssfldt]

I just noticed that there is a major problem for Google - the spam. And I think this has a chance to kill the new Google image-search.
As you know the new image-search uses the images that are hosted somewhere else. You can change your image (it just must have the same width and height). Then you can bring an unexpected image into new google image-search (as someone wrote before).
Of course we would never do dirty blackhat images-seo ;-) but ...

There are a lot of blackhats outside, also imagesearch-blackhats. I think Google forgot that ...

[nicolass]

and coz of that they put your site under black overlay? and cut you traffic? Just wait for day where you will see ads on that "empty" space

[dhaliwal]

I can just recommend all to block them and get the word out to as many big images companies as possible. It dossent iven have to be a image related site, as long they have a few large images. Dont forget to mention Bing to.

we should all try to bring Getty Images, PrPhotos, Infphoto and other image companies. Our client can't renew his contract with these companies, if Google continues to kill image based business like this.

[nicolass]

Getty Images, PrPhotos, Infphoto they don't care coz google at end wanna leave only "big players" like big news sites and similar..and getty and similar sell their images to that big players...they only can get profit bigger

[dhaliwal]

@nicolass

these companies are wanting to sell images to everyone. Even for big players, it won't make sense to pay big royalty payments, if the images don't convert.

You can imagine the amount of loss Zimbio would be making, with this latest update.

Google has actually killed all the traffic that was coming from Google Images. It is as if they have completely killed that traffic for anyone else (small or big sites), and has kept it with itself.

[chrisv1963]

You can imagine the amount of loss Zimbio would be making, with this latest update.

You can see some websites' stats on Quantcast.
I checked Zimbio, PRphotos, TMZ,... all declining. It migth be a coincidence.

[HuskyPup]

My image views are way, way down so far today at 21.4%

Less AdSense money for me means less Adwords money for Google, it's as simple as that.

Plus one of the scrapers they've boosted above me doesn't carry ads of any description!

[gbk666]

But interesting is that all three (Zimbio, PRphotos, TMZ) have increased traffic again since yesterday

[helleborine]

Leaving your images on Google Images, PROS & CONS

PROS

• An ever-shrinking trickle of traffic

CONS

• Leaving your images vulnerable to scrapers (especially with Bing's disgusting, leeching API)
  
• Making your images easily found by pirates that perform Google Image exploits for Trojan injections
  
• People that aren't interested in your website but are image consumers such as Tumblr, Polyvore, Pinterest, etc. can steal your content
  
• Wasting your bandwidth.

It's just not worth it anymore.

[Shell Of A Man]

Overview: My sites deal with millions of impressions a month and we have dropped about 25% in overall traffic since the change over. Thanks Big G.

We pay photo agencies a great deal of money a month to license their photos and have a lot of contraints on how the images we license can be used. Simply put the image you license can only be used on your site or in your network.

So I did some calling around:

I have to be honest if this is where the internet is going, I quit! I don't care how much money I loose. I'm done! Hello any other job that I can have just the tinniest bit of control over.

So seeing how I pay these agencies money every month I decided to give them a call and say "Hey, I pay to license your photos and the new Google image Search is committing copyright infringement by taking photos off my site and showing it to their users without my website being present" This is the reply I got at first, "So your calling to tell us Google changed their image search?" Ok! Ok! So I have to talk to these geniuses a little clearer I take it, so I gave them an example:

"If TMZ goes and creates a large image gallery of images that they have taken from websites across the world and just links back and doesn't pay to license those images are you ok with that?" Then the lights came on "No Way, they have to license those photos!" Well obviously, so now I was getting somewhere, or so I thought at first. "Well it's Google and that is what they do, there a search engine." Well no, not really there a billion dollar business, but hey lets not think outside our cubicle or anything.

In conclusion about half the agencies I talk to were like hey will have our lawyers look into it and the rest for example Getty Images were clueless as to what I was even talking about.

I now understand why as a web entrepreneur I should just hide in the corner and just not talk, because the people who could actually do anything in this world about this still think billboards are a viable business model for advertising and are to concerned with having their nights and weekends something I have not had since 2008. No vacations, My wife had to work on the day she gave birth not to mention our wedding day and I have forgotten what a holiday feels like cause the internet doesn't shut off. Call me crazy, but that's what it has taken for us to make it organically on the internet.

Thanks Google! Oh and Hey let's throw Bing under the bus as well, but who really cares about Bing anyway, just my opinion.

I don't think website owners feel they can do anything, even when you reach millions a month, but like I have read on here maybe a union would be the right idea or at least a committee of webmasters that can speak up. Who knows, but I think I can speak for everyone when I say "With great power comes great responsibility" and Google is abusing their power with this new change.

[gbk666]

They are trying to BE the internet i fear. Controlling as much as possible.

And we..the stupid webmasters are so unorganized, so egoistic that we look only for our own small profit. As mentioned i am from Germany were we have quite strong copyright laws and if google updates their image search here, there will be lawsuits for sure. But how is it in other countries?

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 5:35 pm (utc) on Jan 30, 2013]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[pixar24]

To stop the image hotlinking:
Cloudflare offers a free CDN service, with the option to disable hotlinking.
I enabled the hotlink feature, and Bing + Google can't show the images in full size anymore.
Visitors get an error message from Cloudflare: "The owner of this website (www.xxxx.net) does not allow hotlinking to that resource (/xxxx.jpg)."
Don't know if this will remove the images from the Google/Bing index in time, but it's a first step.

[driller41]

Just wait till they sick some adverts round your images - then you will all be really pi$%ed.

One observation is the caption at the bottom they stick on saying "image may be subject to copyright"

Another small but very evil thing they may do is to add a "next image" button to allow viewers to cycle through the images - that will totally kill clickthroughs

[keyplyr]

Another small but very evil thing they may do is to add a "next image" button to allow viewers to cycle through the images...

That's already there at Google Image Search, also at Bing Image Search.

[driller41]

I am not seeing this in the uk, just "visit page" "view original image" and "image details"

Although Bing is as you say - this version seems much more invasive than Googles version currently is.

[nicolass]

So google is now like thief who stole things and put all that in his room...then someone call police....police come to googles room and see lot of stolen things...also see in room corner written at wall "image may be subject to copyright"...then man with police take his stolen stuff back...but lot of stolen things from other peoples still is in gooles room :)

and hey..is someone tell me that panda is against content farm sites? and what is now google?

[chrisv1963]

Cloudflare offers a free CDN service, with the option to disable hotlinking

Don't use CloudFlare if you have Adsense on your website!

[nicolass]

and one more thing DON'T GIVE UP...coz they wanna kill all small websites ...and take all for their googEmpire

After 10 year you will turn on your GooglePC and see ony one circle button with title under "CHROME"

from that button you can:
- Buy air tickets
- Buy movies
- Watch funny stuff and GangNam Style on YouTube or YouGoole
- See all images sucked and reorganized in layout like Pinterst or GogTerest
- etc...

btw..someone need to make new game "Google May Cry 6"

we need Dante and Nero ;)

[zeus]

As said remove your images with WMT and add a htaccess to block google and Bing. Dont be scared, if they change there policies it only takes a week then your images are back and ranks. That way you say don fu.. with me.

[popac]

gbk666, ty for info.

wwww.google.de and www.google.fr still serve previous version of image search.... think about that... why ?

[gbk666]

I don't know about France but we here in Germany have relative strong copyright laws, and google would break them with the new search for sure.

I am very sure that Google will have a slightly different image search for us ..except they are like "we dont care what the Germans want lol..stupid Krauts"

Also, people here are organizing other people already for a lawsuit, other ones like mssfldt blogged about it and got at least some hundred followers via fb etc together and made a nice banner about defending our images.

I myself am talking about the thing whereever i can to make other people thinking and talking about it. I even placed a small textbox on my site now about the thing.

[Errioxa]

Do you see an increase in the bounce rate?

[Andem]

There was an article in Germany today regarding the new Google images layout, more specifically questioning the legality of the new design that Google will most likely introduce to Germany.

[spiegel.de...] [German]

Here's what happened to me in the summer: I got fed up with Google's (then) changing policy on showing images in a shadowbox-like frame but disabling javascript on the original site. For around 200 high-res images, I completely banned all access to any image requests from Mountain View and they eventually disappeared from the index. Bounce rates AND load averages dropped.

More recently, I started showing 403 responses to Google for all image attachments and galleries on my forums and load average dropped even more. Site speed has increased nicely and I couldn't be happier for it.

I plan to slowly start this process with thousands of other images we have uploaded over the years on a couple of different sites.

Once this catches on, the relevancy of Google Image Search will have decreased significantly. In a few years, with the image scrapers and hotlinkers no longer able to find images to steal, Image Search may well be a thing of the past.

[gbk666]

@ Errioxa nope no bounce rate change...but a small change in views per visitor, which is no wonder since the few people who still click through are most likely people interested in the content of the website while the others care only for the images.

[Errioxa]

I think now the users don't know the type of website which provides the image. They do not know if the site is a forum, if it is a sales site or a web of pictures.

Many users will click by random, they will see that it is a forum about a film, and the users will come back again to other result, by random, because they want buy a ticket to the cinema.

[lucy24]

I got other comments too

What a lot of talkative friends you've got. (This is assuming for the sake of discussion that the first set of answers were genuine comments from real humans. Gotta say they seemed to be amazingly similar to the "lump it!" genre of WebmasterWorld posts-- the ones coming from people who understand your position on some given subject, but happen not to agree with it.)

Now could you please go back and ask them why they were using Image Search in the first place. This is absolutely crucial and everyone seems to be ignoring it. You have to know what the users want in order to know when, and whether, it's to your advantage to block anything. You have to know what the users want in order to offer them something better than what the search engine has.

And then, finally, go back to those ordinary, non-www-professional humans and present them with the concept of a webmaster blocking a search engine, thereby preventing the contents of your site from turning up in search results. I will be very surprised if the reaction is anything other than "Huh?" and its synonyms.

[helleborine]

And then, finally, go back to those ordinary, non-www-professional humans and present them with the concept of a webmaster blocking a search engine, thereby preventing the contents of your site from turning up in search results. I will be very surprised if the reaction is anything other than "Huh?" and its synonyms.

I personally don't care what people think; I am making a rational Homo economicus decision to block my images from search engines in the future. Let people find me via regular search and actually visit my website.

I'm angry that Google doesn't provide us with some elegant way to opt out of showing large images, so I have to go with the next best thing which is a brute force htaccess & robots.txt solution. But at least there IS a solution, even if it's scrappy.

I'm not spiteful about it, I looked at the pros and cons and decided on a logical course of action.

They changed the rules of the game; I'm changing my own strategy accordingly.

I think anyone who, like me, has an image-based website that no longer gets noticeable traffic from Google Images should do the same - at least their images are protected from scrapers and pirates when they no longer show up in Google/Bing Images, at the cost of negligible loss of traffic.

On one hand, the 150 visitors/month I get from G-Images (compared to 10,000 a couple of years ago) is worth about 10 cents in AdSense revenues. On the other hand, wasting my time filing complaints with Google when pirates use my images for search hijacking and Trojan injections is costly and irritating.

Just a rational decision. I know I'm not punishing Bing/Google. I'm just looking out for my own interests.

[lucy24]

I personally don't care what people think

It's not what people think; it's what they know. Or, in this case, what they do know that ain't so. I'll wager that your average human has no idea that a website can prevent search engines from seeing or indexing its content. So if you search for something and don't find it, it means that the thing you're searching for doesn't exist.

Incidentally, back on page 2 of this thread someone mentioned "blank.html" as referer. Can anyone pinpoint when this started? The earliest I can find is the 19th of this month. Fortuitously it was from google.fi (bona fide Finnish IP, using Chrome). Not google dot com. A different google.

Personally I consider "blank.html" to be Cheating. But it also makes me nervous, because if you go to investigate-- the page exists, and is indeed blank even in "view source" mode-- who knows what kind of php nefariousness is going on in the background?

[matrix_jan]

Just like in text serps a part of an article is presented to the user in order to provide some kind of an idea what the page is about, google must watermark our own pictures when showing to the user. There are billions of pages on the net that have a large image with very brief description. Google's (and Bings') move simply kills this page owners. Users are looking for the image and they get the image from google. How is this different from content theft? I don't want to block google image search because that's how users generally find my gallery websites, and I want it to stay that same. But that doesn't mean that I want to provide my images for free.