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About Google Images and Image Search Ads
BySylvie FodorTechnology is out there enabling wonderful images to be seen. Google Images shows us how to make money with images, not by producing and selling them, but by showing them at random next to an advertisement and selling the advertisement.
Last month, Google announced the launch of an improved image search system and a new Expanded Image Search Ads.
GOOGLE BLOG
The Image Search includes a number of improvements for web users :
- Larger thumbnail preview
- Live enlargements of images
- Denser layout of images with up to 1,000 images on a single scrollable page
- Better navigation
Google technology is similar to competitor's Bing. In fact, some say that it is actually borrowed from Bing!
According to Nate Smith, Google Image product manager, Google Images now indexes over 10 billion images. The company announces that it sees more than a billion page views per day on Google Images.
Picture agencies will welcome these technological improvements. Search engines are useful, not only to the economy of the Internet, but also to picture agencies who are happy to have their images searched and found.
The improved search features are not the end of the story though. Google has also launched a new service, Image Search Ads. It now allows Google to make money with images - not by selling them, as an image producer, but by displaying ads next to them!
Roughly 75% of global Internet users enjoy Google services. With more users than any other Internet company, Google has the ability to make new ad-targetting methods mainstream. The new advertising method is likely to be hugely popular. With travel agencies for example, a user looking for a picture of the Eiffel Tower will get cheap offers to fly to Paris. The pictures of the Eiffel Tower appearing will indirectly advertise the travel agency displaying the ad.
Legally, this is a challenging situation. It is clearly a commercial activity. Advertisers are getting the value of a picture shown at random and no longer serving as just a link; the search machine gets a revenue from showing the image. But what about the image provider/ rightsholder? Moral rights issues, property and personality rights issues are raised as well : what if the picture appears next to the "wrong" advert? In 2008, German photographer Michael Bernhardt won a case against Google Images arguing amongst other things that the pictures of his models had been used by the website of a brothel. (*)
Last but not least, this new facility adds fuel to an older debate on the Internet: should content providers receive a "fair share" of the revenues of search engines on the web?
This issue, as well as the one around the legality in Europe of showing thumbnails through search engines, will be the topic of further blogs.
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(*) The case has been appealed by Google.
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This is a Positive and Negative Development
I love Google for their innovations, however this image search thing as good as it might benefit advertisers I think it would eventually hurt the Stock image business in the long run.
The positive aspect of it is that, the travel Agencies and may be the Stock Image Companies (SIC) may benefit too, through paid for searches that may link searched results back to their websites with the hope of driving traffic to their site and hopefully making sales.
However I think the negative impact would have a long term effects on the overall growth of the Microstock and Stock Image Industries.
For example I come from a region of the world where it is virtually impossible to track image usage most designers currently go to Google to source for images which they eventually use in their projects instead of purchasing licensed images from the SIC.
With the new search option provided in Google Images, that allows for large images to be searched and downloaded is rather alarming take a look at the following links that I got from Google images after requesting for google to look for images that are larger than 10 MP.
This image came from website that is suppose to be for invited members only.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.concertedefforts.com/high...
This second link is also from the same search result:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://rawtoon.comuf.com/web_images/...
With results like this designers and other image buyers would stop buying images.
I think Google should make it impossible to download such Hires images to protect the content owners.
So the question is does Google have the legal rights to search the internet for such images? and make it available and free for all?
At this rate very soon google would develop a technology that allows them to search our Databases and make our users list available to the public. simply because they can do it.