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Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

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Re: Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

#112
post #6

You can still get to the original image from the results without an extension. If you select an image in the search results and right click on it, you can (in chrome at least) select "Open image in new tab" to get to the full image.

It gives a low resolution thumbnail of the image

Re: Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more interesting question is why google is doing this. They got sued. "These changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week."

Why not just remove the feature for pictures from Getty then, or simply not show their pictures at all? Surely that is within the technical capability of Google.

Because then every other company would file similar suite and Google would have to deal with all of them.

Re: Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

#114
While I understand the reason Google did it (because of lawsuits), this is very annoying, and I mean in general: you don't know how or if you can use a resource you fetch from a website even if its robots.txt allows you to fetch it. This is in fact an even bigger deal for small companies than for Google, since the latter already reached a size where it can manage the issue somehow.

It would be nice to have a version of robots.txt that states (in a predefined format) the license under which the resource is available. That way you could know right away what you can and you can not do with it.

Re: Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

#116
post #107
post #92

Quotes from @searchliaison: "Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." "Ultimately, Google Images is a way for people to discover information in cases where browsing images is a better experience than text." Do you believe any of these statements? I am still surprised how easily corporations will hide their true motives, resolve any cognitive dissonance internally…

One of the follow up tweets is more honest: >For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week (see also https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v... …). They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964279749802512384

It's the same shit that happened to Google Books, really.

Re: Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

#117
post #31

I'm going to play devils advocate here and say this is a good change. If google was scaping the text of sites and only displaying that, would we think that was ok? Just like google search, this is about giving you a preview, then go to the source. If you want the image, we all know how to find it, get it. How big of an annoyance is this?

This is a huge annoyance. A lot of times I am looking for images which are in the public domain, and for which if I go to the page in question, I have to then sort through dozens of images to find the one I had been looking at already in the search. Here's an example. I've just done a search, found an image that I want to view larger, the image is long since in the public domain, but when I click on "visit" I get a p…

> A lot of times I am looking for images which are in the public domain

Do you think that’s a valid justification to give the person who hosted it no credit and traffic for their work, instead choosing to leech the image directly from their server at their cost? The fact that they built a page around the image with relevant keywords that is the only reason you found it through Google in the first place. There’s nothing stopping someone from building a public domain image search that hosts its own images, but you went to Google for convenience.

Re: Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more interesting question is why google is doing this. They got sued. "These changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week."

Why not just remove the feature for pictures from Getty then, or simply not show their pictures at all? Surely that is within the technical capability of Google.

Presumably because others could now sue Google for the same reasons, and they would be even more likely to win given the Getty result.
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