Google Images -- what are the changes?

Massive increase in image hits in 2004

[borad]

In recent times, with the revision of the Google Images section, I've been getting a LOT more traffic from it -- indeed, for my small sites, 3 times as much from images than for normal Google searches.

Of course, much of the traffic is useless, and I've had to set up hotlink protection as a result of the higher profile.

For example, one of my pics abruptly ranks highly for <<biggest city in Australia>>. Sure, it's in the url, and some nearby text, but that's not really reason enough from my point of view.

Only reason I can think of is that this site is heavily Australian-themed and is an .au site. It is far from themed on <<biggest city in Australia>>.

Anyone got any insights on what makes images.google tick in 2004?