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...]

[gemeweb]

I see that 2 employees of Google, Jessica and 1 guy are posting on this thread: [productforums.google.com...]

[edited by: goodroi at 5:48 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2013]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[zeus]

Just made a test over a few weeks and did so that google did not have access to my images, images count on google slowly declined until zero. Then I gave them permission again, within 24 hours 1000 images was back online. Just a note, so you will be back in short short time if something changes and trust me google want your content, so it will be back fast. Did also not note anything ranking wise.

[jost]

I thought google banned content scrappers?

They have officially become the largest illegal content scraper site in the world.

Stealing everyones images for themselves while cutting off 90% of referral traffic.

Class action lawsuit within weeks.
As soon as the big law firms realize there are millions of webmasters getting royally screwed by google stealing all their image content for themselves, and that there are billions on the line, its game on.

What an evil, predatory, cut throat, piece of #*$! company google has become.

Do no evil my ass.

[jost]

Instagram got hit with a class action lawsuit quickly when they tried a similar thing

[pcworld.com...]

[gbk666]

Hello,

i want to rebuild my website now, change the focus there a bit and also make sure that google and bing can only scrape those images i want them to scrape

I work with wordpress and multiple image folders are not too easy too handle i fear. So far i used its standard upload system.

I bet it was mentioned before but can someone please give me the robot.txt code i would need for google and bing to

allow the standard folder "images" but disallow the folder "fullsizedimages"

I am using a fanshare similar solution (without any watermarks and texts directly on the images though) now btw but the results are not really breathtaking. I lost over 70% traffic to the google image search changed and gained back only around 15% of them after enabling the fanshare similar solution.


In the future i won't make images available above 400 pixels width. I also remove the whole 25000 older images from my website now so they will be removed from google soon too. And hope many other webmasters do so as well and find solutions.

Guys, we have to care about our content now like only the music and movie industry before.

[zeus]

jost - my words

[dhaliwal]

for sure, there is money to be made by lawyers in this case.

[lucy24]

I don't know through what voodoo, but Google is showing images from by image folders that is blocked to its bot, following its own instructions!

Double-checking here: You mean within image search, not in preview?

Did you explicitly remove (de-index) the images? Image search, like ordinary search, doesn't check to see whether the image/page is available right now. It uses the information it's already got. Hotlinking by definition doesn't involve a detour to robots.txt, since there's no crawling. The user's browser is putting in its own request, saying "google sent me". Or, in this case, "I was told to ask for..."

[gemeweb]

Bing has changed today its image search, haha

It looks similar to the new Gog [s3.postimage.org...]

[helleborine]

@lucy24

I mean actual PREVIEW. The big picture when you click on the thumbnail. It's from my bot-disallowed folder - a folder that was forbidden to bots BEFORE I even made it.

[lucy24]

Oh, the image-search preview. They probably count it as Not A Robot in the same way that ordinary Preview (the www-search kind) is Not A Robot. Look at your logs and you should be able to figure out exactly who's doing the requesting and when.

Matter of fact, I'm going to do a bit more experimenting. This will involve setting select images to no-caching-at-all, so I can only hope that both g### and my ISP honor this directive. (Like so much else on the internet, it works on the honor system.)

[Andem]

They have officially become the largest illegal content scraper site in the world.

You seem pretty sure of yourself. Officially illegal? Where? Are you the supreme court judge of every single country in the world? I highly doubt that any supreme court in any country has declared this "officially illegal." On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised if most countries in the world, including the odd ones that Eric Schmidt visited like North Korea, 'officially' declared this 'legal'. Just sayin'.

I don't know through what voodoo, but Google is showing images from by image folders that is blocked to its bot

Google hasn't been respecting robots.txt for a long time. I only got rid of them when I started returning a 404 to Googlebot.

[lucy24]

I started returning a 404 to Googlebot

Please say that's a typo for 403. Give google a 404 and you'll never see the last of them. (Google, unlike bing, distinguishes between 404 and 410.)

And, er, it's a quibble admittedly, but the adverb "officially" modifies the verb "become", not the adjective "illegal" ;) You'd have to really contort the sentence to read it a different way.

I don't think there's an internationally recognized standard directory of scrapers-- legal or otherwise-- though.

[chrisv1963]

You seem pretty sure of yourself. Officially illegal? Where?

Officially violating the law.

"FBI Anti-Piracy Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000."

This article explains a lot: [onthewingphotography.com...]

Moderator's note: For the sake of clarity we are leaving the link - something that would normally be
outside our guidelines. However, this article does explain the common argument quite clearly - the claim
that Google violates copyright law. As such it is a useful summary statement.

However, please notice the disclaimer at the end of the article itself:
"Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and none of the content above is to be
considered legal advice, the opinions are my own and nothing more."

[edited by: tedster at 3:20 pm (utc) on Feb 5, 2013]

[Andem]

@chrisv1963: Thanks for providing the link.

It appears I was a bit rude with my comments, so I apologize. I highly recommend reading that article, though relevant to US law.

[ianevans]

I saw the fansshare solution for the first time yesterday. Any idea how they're doing what they're doing, suddenly replacing the image on Image Search with one with a message overlay?

Also any nginx'ers in here? Most of the suggestions I've seen here so far are for Apache.

Thanks.
.
Mods note: While normally we try to avoid mentioning specific sites, in this case we've decided that the fansshare approach is so clean and elegant that it will be generally helpful to note the example.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:44 am (utc) on Feb 6, 2013]

[dhaliwal]

@chrisv1963: yes, that article nicely explains the whole story.

[helleborine]

I've been searching on the web for ways to effectively block this new image search and I've noticed a marked increase in the number of blog posts, articles, comments of upset webmasters.

I'm thinking some of us with popular websites should get together and speak to journalists of national newspapers to get the story out.

[pixar24]

Yes, the fansshare.com way seems a good technical solution.
+For Bing Image search, you are automatically redirected to the fansshare site, after clicking a thumb in image search.

[ianevans]

But what is the fansshare solution. Is it hand-rolled or off-the-shelf? I only ask if it's off the shelf as the img with the overlay seems to mention going over a byte limit, so I wondered if it was a software they were using.

[HuskyPup]

Has anyone asked fansshare yet?

They might have a little goldmine on their hands and not even have realised it:-)

[gbk666]

take a look at the game-art-hq solution too

[martaay]

I asked a few days ago when I saw their solution, have had no reply

[levo]

They might have a little goldmine on their hands and not even have realised it:-)

They are using 302 redirect. No referer and/or other domains redirect to watermarked image (with a random number in URL).

Scratch that, if the UA for page request is Googlebot, they serve img links without CDN. When Googlebot(-image?) requests the image without the cdn subdomain, they serve the actual image, if a visitor (any other UA) requests the image without the cdn subdomain, they serve the watermarked one. If visitors clicks the result and goes to the website, embedded image URL includes the CDN subdomain.

[martaay]

To update my earlier post I have actually heard back from them, heres the response:

.htaccess and PHP+GD Library is applied to achieve the function, + functions as imagecopymerge() was a big one in recreating the opacity overlay!

[dhaliwal]

@martaay

i am not good at programming. So, i guess we need someone to implement this as an easy to use solution.

Also, calling "TheMadScientist" to help us.

[iordakis]

@gbk666

"take a look at the game-art-hq solution too "

What is their solution? I can't see any.

[iordakis]

I have a simple html site holding thousands of images. I also lost over 70% of the traffic and adsense income overnight.

I see everywhere redirect/watermark solutions that implies php , there is a way I can get this to work on simple html site? Or I will need to migrate somehow?

[gbk666]

an additional php file should not be the problem thats how i did it as well

Trust me, watermarks alone are not bringing a lot though. Redirecting people who want to see a fullsized image directly to your normal page is more useful. Through that i gained around 40-60% of my normal traffic back.

@iordakis

Look via the image search and you see darkend thumbs + after clicking to see the original size you land on the normal website

[HuskyPup]

I also lost over 70% of the traffic and adsense income overnight.

I have had varying results since this introduction.

1. My largest gallery which has had hotlink protection for a couple of years ago and serves up a 500 error when clicked on in Google, initially lost traffic but has now returned to normal however AdSense earnings are fluctuating wildly from one day to the next.

2. My second largest site has lost half of its traffic and income, period, even though this also throws a 500 error when clicked in the results or hotlinked to.

3. My third biggest's traffic is actually up by 50%, it throws the same 500 error but interestingly ALL the images are watermarked on that site.

Other sites vary but generally most have traffic down in the 50% region although overall my AdSense has not been hurt too badly since CTR is actually up with average earnings at 99.1% v January so far.

What I have noticed is, once more, a lot of scrapers using my images and blowing mine off the first page even though mine were there years before, and I mean is some cases 12 years!