New, Faster, Improved Image Search On Bing

[engine]

Starting today, we’re rolling out a brand new way to make it faster or more simple to explore imagery on Bing. Now when you click an image, we don't waste your time loading a new page or force you todig through a bunch of clutter. The new design loads quickly placing the image center stage.
New, Faster, Improved Image Search On Bing [bing.com]

We even introduced full-screen mode: just click “View larger” to give it a try.

Preview Sites Before Clicking Through

We’re always striving for a clean, simple experience. But under the hood, Bing has all the power tools you need to find the right result.

For example, you might find a picture you like and wonder where it came from. With our new Page Snapshot technology, we give you a convenient preview. This lets you see if the webpage is helpful and make sure you trust it before you visit.

[zeus]

not2easy How about your suggestion how to make the preview not work, more specifics. I recommend every website owner to block Bing with a no index in the header.

[not2easy]

The only way I can think of is to block the Bing Preview UA, I would be happier to find out there is another way. A noindex in the header would be signaling to gugle and bing not to index your page, I don't want that to happen. I am disallowing .jpg, .png and .gif as well as the msnbot in robots.txt, but it is not robots.txt compliant so that can't help much.
If their bots used different IP ranges it would be easy but they must have dozens of UA strings. I'm seeing the msnbot grabbing useless insignificant images like an old menu divider gif and css files, they seem to love css files. I sometimes think they are scraping css files to see if they can figure out how to make IE fully compliant, :).

[keyplyr]

Just a FYI - the Bing Preview has nothing to do with Bing Image Search (the topic of this thread.)

[matrix_jan]

@keyplyr

Not quite sure what you mean. When I view my own images on bing I see Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b visiting to generate the small page preview on the bottom right corner.

[keyplyr]

Bing Preview = preview in SERP & source preview in Bing Image Search results, but the bot scraping your images for the Bing Image Search is Bingbot, not BingPreview.

Thus - blocking BingPreview will not stop Bingbot from scraping your images nor get them removed once they're in there. In fact, if your images are *already* in the Bing Image Search results, blocking any of the Bing bots will not remove these images, only stop them from being removed.

The only way to get Bing to remove your images from the Bing Image Search results is to allow Bingbot to crawl these images again and to *now* use the NOINDEX X-Robots-Tag HTTP header for your images, but NOT for the web pages themselves. This is important since blocking Bingbot from crawling the web pages containing the images will stop them from updating the index status of the images.

These are the exact words from my guy at Bing when I asked him on Dec 20.

If using Apache server (and if your config supoports it) add this to htaccess file in each image directory (not the base htaccess file):

Header append X-Robots-Tag: noindex 

(then access your image file using a header checker tool to check and see if the NOINDEX tag is being included. If not, check with your server admin for the proper way to include it.)

Note - IMO using the NOINDEX X-Robots-Tag HTTP header it will still take 30 to 90 days for your indexed images to get removed from Bing Image Search.

[zeus]

keyplyr - will that only block bing image or also google, because many dont want to block google (yet)

[keyplyr]

keyplyr - will that only block bing image or also google, because many dont want to block google (yet)

zeus - using a NOINDEX X-Robots-Tag HTTP header will not *block* anything, it will only tell the SEs (that comply) not to index your images. Sorry, it will tell Google and other SEs this as well.

There is not a mechanism to only tell Bing not to index images unless you cloak (deliver different responses to different UAs, which is taboo and if caught, could bring penalties.)

Robots.txt will only disallow images from being crawled (and thus indexed) if the SE does *not* already have your images. Adding a disallow for a certain bot in robots.txt will not remove any images already indexed. The only to do this is as I described above, using the NOINDEX X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.

Sorry, there is not a perfect solution.

[not2easy]

Thank you for your input keyplyr, I am not concerned about those they have already because I intend to both move them and batch rename the images. I think the X-Robots tag for the image directory is fine because none of the SE are welcome to use the images I am blocking. The rest of the images, everyone is welcome to.

[matrix_jan]

My solution to the problem:

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

and

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

Bing was eating so much traffic through hotlinking that either I had to upgrade my server or block it. From business perspective, upgrading just to serve bing my images would mean advertising on their website with minimum hope of getting referral traffic. And the bing preview was generating so much ghost traffic that it became just annoying. Now my pages and images (cached image is shown) stay in bing, just no more monkey business with filling their pages with my content. Bye-bye bing. This is where search engines fail. They should have left an option of breaking out of hotlinking through js.

[zeus]

Just placed your code in my image folder

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

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

And now they just show there little image and when you click it they get to a 403, somehow we must be able to direct the visitor to a page.

[matrix_jan]

@zeus

The 403 is on your server right? My 403 is a custom php file, so all I have to do is catch the requested image and redirect to the parent page. I hope I will not have any issues with that. And there goes the solution :)

One more thing, change

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} bing

to

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} bing.com

[matrix_jan]

Update:

Now clicking on the image takes users directly to the parent page. Take that Bing!

I just added few lines in my 403 file. Before redirecting to the parent page the code makes sure that users are coming from bing image search, request is an actual image, and that the to-be-redirected url(build from the REQUEST_URI ) returns 200.

[not2easy]

matrix_jan - I admire your solution. Any chance it could be used as an include?

[matrix_jan]

@not2easy

Since url is for the image, I don't think include is a good approach. If you're worrying about the referral data then I used Chrome and IE and both pass as referral traffic and not direct.

[zeus]

For you how wants to change 403, just add this to your header <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='http://www.yourdomain'"> then it redirects to your domain name page

[keyplyr]

For you how wants to change 403, just add this to your header <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='http://www.yourdomain'"> then it redirects to your domain name page

You'll create a terminal loop for those agents that are forbidden.

[zeus]

Well I dont have any sites that a are forbidden, I have many 301, but ok I also dont know that much about server systems.

[not2easy]

@matrix_jan Thanks, I can understand why it wouldn't help - it was wishful thinking. I have just banned BingPreview as a UA because they are not just requesting images, they pull the whole page with all related files. It keeps the bing IP so I don't want to block that but I have had to disable AdSense because other links on the page indicate (nonexistent) clicks whenever they request a page. The links do not normally set a cookie from viewing the page, but they are when shown via BingPreview. They are making nonsense of my stats.

[keyplyr]

Just in...

Google Image Search has also switched to a similar schema as Bing, except the images appear to be cached. But like the new Bing Image Search, all the frame-breaking tactics no longer work.

[helleborine]

Excellent, I now need to block them both from accessing my images.