More On Google Images

Google has become the biggest image scraper of the Millennium is one of the best commentaries on the new Image search, do not miss it!

Google has made a serious mistake, they are looking at class action lawsuits being filed against their company. As a photographer and copyright holder I’d be happy to join any and all of those class action law suits against Google. The way I see it Google is crapping on our rights as artists, creators and photographers. And I am furious about it.

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Discussions About Image Searches

A discussion about the new Google Images rollout can be found here:
Google Images' New (Bing-like) Layout

A discussion about the Bing Images can be found here:
Bing is stealing our server's bandwidth

Bing Images offers rogue webmasters an API whereby they can leech off Bing, for example, picstopin and other similar dodgy image websites.

Some Terrible, Terrible News.

You heard it here first. Pinterest's greatest "contribution" to the internet is to set off a tsunami of image theft from every direction, inspiring countless websites to join the fray of image vampires.

Google has now rolled out a new Image Search - as if the search engine giant was trying to "undercut" Pinterest in the highly popular image-theft business.

Try it yourself: got to Google Images, launch a search query, and click on any image.

You'll see that Google now displays a large version of that image WITHIN GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH. That's right; Google has no longer confines itself to the use of thumbnails. Why not, since the copyright-infringement trailblazer Pinterest remains to this day free of serious legal challenges?

Adding insult to injury, Google has neglected to provide an opt out mechanism for webmasters to block the display of large images.

And here we are again, in some bizarre situation where we have to take action if we want our copyright to be respected.

Google, if it chose to do so, would have the ability to give webmasters a disadvantage in search engine results should they decide to opt out of image theft. This is quite a sinister development.

For more: Plagiarism Today.

The issues of Google hotlinking larger images or encouraging others to misuse images aren’t going to subside.

Help Fill This Page Up!

Splendid. Google has new "transparency reports" that make public the copyright infringement complaints that a website receives THROUGH GOOGLE. We're not talking about filing DMCAs with Pinterest's online tool, but rather, reporting copyrighted content that appear in the Google search engine result pages, to Google itself.

Link: Transparency report for Pinterest


That's all? Copyright owners need to be more diligent
in reporting infringement to Google; it counts.

To report copyright infringement to Google: Removing Content From Google

Hopefully, if copyright owners complain to Google with greater regularity and insistence, Google's hand may be forced to take action against the popular crowdscraper.

Google Pinterizes Its Image Search

Google Images' thumbnails are now much larger
at a set 180 pixels in height,
as shown in this unscaled screenshot.

I did a Google image search just yesterday. This morning, when I did it again, the array of images jumped at me. They were much, much larger.

They are measured at 180 pixels in height, and the even larger image that hovers over the thumbnail is now a relatively insignificant ~10% larger than the thumbnail itself. After you click to reach the actual website, there is a further intervening image that is near full-size (this is not new). Pin hags now have a choice of 2 large thumbnails hosted on Google, and a third, near full-size image that is hovering over the real one, but hosted by the content creator's website.

Pinterest's unique combination of wanton disregard for the creators whose images its users are feverishly scraping, and unfortunate success, has started a veritable conflagration of imitation that is changing the internet as we know it. And not in a good way. Where once citizen-publishers could turn a profit displaying their own images, there will be nothing but ashes left.

The latest Pinterest imitator is a heartbreaker. Google. It's a heartbreaker because Google is so large. It's not difficult to foresee a competition between search engines for who can display the biggest thumbnails without getting its wrists slapped by the law. Right now, competitor Bing's thumbnails are 75% smaller or less than Google's new supersized thumbnails. But for how long?


Bing Image search thumbnails haven't yet been pinterized.

How the other hand, it's easy to guess what Google might be thinking. Why not render Pinterest image collections even more pointless than they are now, by "improving" Google Image search? The downside is that the unashamed pinning from Google Images (which over-rides a site's nopin metatag, to add insult to injury) will be more rewarding to the pin hags, and that visitors can now spend more time on Google Images and have another reason to avoid visiting the creator's websites.

Pinterest forcing content creators to compete against their own websites was one thing. Now, Google is doing much of the same.

Pinterest's SEO Pays Off, Infringees Suffer

As predicted, Pinterest pages are now rising above
the original content in SERPs.


Photographer Mark Tisdale, in his article Search Engines Should Reward Original Works reports:

What I couldn’t help noticing as I worked my way through the results, my photo hosted on my site was the dead last that Google showed in its results. [...]it would ameliorate the cause for concern for a great many visual artists who feel they have to police the internet because of sites like Pinterest and the many clones that have sprung up over night. There’s no white washing for theft, particularly theft for profit, but at least those other copies shouldn’t dilute the brand of the content creator.

Meanwhile, on Webmasterworld, a webmaster laments:

My site is retail so our products end up all over these types of sites (pinterest, kaboodle, wanelo, etc.) only this year we've been noticing that these sites are outranking us for our own products and descriptions we wrote ourselves. Not sure if this is a widespread problem that everyone is seeing or if this is an indication of a problem with our site.

I just don't understand how another site can outrank us.

Another has this to say:

I'm seeing this too. The problem is that it creates an extra step between you and your potential customer. Getting outranked with your own descriptions and creating an extra gap between you and customers will not improve business. More and more online retailers are posting their products on such sites but might be in for an unpleasant surprise when those pages outrank the original.

We have warned our readers, in both Clone Wars and Nasty Linking Practices, of the danger that our original content be buried under the weight of duplicated images from crowdscrapers. The posts received a lot of attention from private "pro member" forums from Zazzle, to which I have no access. I understand that much of that attention was critical and skeptical.

Creators Against Pinterest's prediction is being borne out by results. The prophecy has been fulfilled.

It was, unfortunately, quite easy to see that one coming for anyone with enough experience and accurate knowledge of how search engines rank websites. Many people don't really bother peeking under the hood - they are the ones that will get burned by their excitement of a few extra visitors from Pinterest, failing to realize their net traffic is dropping quite possibly because of Pinterest.

Crowds

A guest post by M. Sara 23/09/12

Men the most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts, passions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment— religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies, &c. — the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals.From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent.It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal individuals of a race in much the same degree — it is precisely these qualities,I say, that in crowds become common property.

In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality,are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.

from ‘The Crowd’ - Gustave Le Bon 1896

Not so long ago (2003), before the advent of smart phones in every pocket and ipads and the “monetization” of the www do you remember the early flash mobs very fun. Then the primary means of connecting and informing people of an event was email. Facebook and Twitter and all the other social networks fill in for smaller reach of email and can have more more serious consequences than a bunch of happy people dancing in the mall. Revolutions, riots and Coca Cola all now use the technology available along with the mob meme to get insurgents to the right place at the right time and to advertize to the consumer.

The biggest problem for Google before they had photo mapped the world, sent their own photographers out to photograph businesses and encouraged people to write their own map pages and the customers to write the reviews was content. In the beginning they outsourced to companies like Menulog.com who used scrapping software and search robots to download entire websites of restaurants to their servers then used the images and menus in their templates. These scrapping services would then feed the information and any updates straight to Google a couple of times a week and Google would use the information to populate their map info pages. The scrapping service would in most cases always be at the top of any Google search results unless the business had very good SEO. The scrapping company would also blackmail the business owner into becoming a “member” so you could update your menus etc for a price per month on their site when you had a perfectly valid website of your own that had been stolen by them. This model has changed and Menulog.com now operates as a delivery service but when it was scrapping it made a fortune for someone probably quite a few people.

The statistics of the Crowd are interesting 2.3 billion people use the internet that is ⅓ of the world population of that third 62% use social media - that is a lot of content. Instead of using code written by a few extra clever people and implemented on site why not use 2.3 billion individuals to skim their own viewed content for free. Same general model but far more effective using the processing power of all those personal smart phones laptops and desktops. Pinterest has over 4 million daily unique visitors one assumes a fair percentage are pinning.

This is a map of one days April 1, 2011 uploads to Flickr [April 1, 2011] by geographic location

It is worth a closer look

Millions of individuals choosing the 'fashions' you will notice the sameness of what is pinned .. it is about fashion and fashion is advertising and that is merchandising. Selling Coca-Cola [ the biggest individual item sold in Australian Supermarkets and it is basically sugar, water and chemicals] works on fashion as well and if millions are choosing then it will be the average that is a mathematical and psychological certainty. The pinning is the flip side of trolling... finding a space in the internet's neural network to gain a psychological validation and about as useful as trolling. Imagine the world map under this map and you can see the how the www connects:
The neural networks in the human brain

When a brain is attached to the overall internet network by a personal device and then interacts via a portal of some kind , a search engine, a blogging program, facebook etc thei ruploaded content fills the spaces between the ads, it is the audience to the content that is providing the revenue to the “owners” of the portal by buying or by receiving advertizing. It would be a mistake to simply consider them “sites” as they do their best to be end destinations that is that all the sharing buttons are about, keeping you within their revenue stream you can share your connection to another portal but will hopefully continue to be corralled on whatever part of the www you might spend or earn the money. What you have is a collective mind,the entire network could be seen as a machine , if you look back to the quote I began with, this snippet: “In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened.” in the case of the collective www sharing mind I suspect that respect for the individual idea or concept is subsumed by the amount of senseless interaction that is made to look like an exchange of knowledge, therefore worthwhile - comments, sharing buttons, competitions, strange games about farms or scrabble with friends but is really about keeping bums on seats.All that is not to say that there are not many nooks and crannies of the internet that don’t use this economic model many people still use the usenet rather than face book or twitter [Google groups has an archive 700 million Usenet postings from a period of more than 20 years - so as not to miss advertizing to that crowd] the open source community is active in many areas and there are blogs that are not a part of the machine collective consciousness. The number of people playing in the shadows is dwarfed however by the social media users.

Does any of it matter? Creative individual expression has always been subjugated by the mob . The collective unconscious has always frowned on difference and without the crowd there is no need for counter culture or the underground. Knowledge is power, information without knowledge is entertainment … controlling the collective consciousness and offloading the responsibility to the individuals within the crowd via terms of service is money for nothing, and your content for free. It does matter but in the end the user gets to choose how they approach the paradigm if they are smart enough to understand the psychology and depending on their ethics ignore it , use it or subvert it.

Reporting To Google

DMCA notices have become a familiar routine for many content creators.

However effective, these notices have no teeth and remove all incentives for the offender to monitor its content.

With Google recent announcement that it will penalize websites receiving abundant copyright complaints, we now have a tool that allow us to mete out a modicum of well-deserved punishment to sites like Pinterest.

The first requirement is that your infringed image show up in a Google search. This can be quite easy once you have located your work to then search it with Google with some accurate keywords, or even URL identifiers.

The second requirement is that you do not have the content removed from Pinterest by way of DMCA until after your Google complaint is processed. Be patient, they are not fast.

The Google Complaint Form is here. Bookmark it!

You can lodge a complaint when your infringed content is linked by Google through its web search, or image search. This means that you are able to legitimately use the complaint tool when entering an image URL in the search box. You can also use the site command in the search query box in this format: site:pinterest.com mywebsite.com or site:pinterest.com My Name.

Your efforts should result in some unknown amount of downgrading of Pinterest's importance in search results.

Pinterest Clears Its Throat

Ahem!

There is a change on Pinterest on how pins taken from search engine results are identified. Whereas only the result page URL was recorded before, now, the image links still leads to the result page, but Pinterest has added a link to the original source.

As usual, Pinterest is the master of half-arsed measures. Why is Pinterest accepting pins from search engines images at all? And if they are accepting such pins, and recording the original source, why are they not respecting their own proprietary nopin metatag?

That's right; the bozos handling the programming aren't respecting the nopin metatag when users pin from search engine image results.

Cough, cough.

Adding insult to injury, the new link to the source is given a "nofollow" attribute, rendering it useless to the content creator.

Blog Roundup

Stop Using Pinterest For Affiliate Marketing Now

Google pledges to deprecate sites with a lot of copyright infringement complaints from its result pages:
Search Engine to Penalize Sites Accused of Copyright Infringement

Some easy-to-follow instructions to de-list your infringing links from Google Web Search. Note that your material must be discovered through Google Web Search for this to work:
How to DMCA : Google Web Search, De-Listing Infringing Links

Pinterest: Nice Pictures of Real Traffic Generation?

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Advertise on Pinterest

Loss Of Search Engine Rankings - Could Pinterest Be The Cause?

LINK

Spying On The EMBED Code

Q: How widely used is the EMBED code?

A: Query this search string with your favorite search engine:
"Image Source * via * on Pinterest" - over half a million images embedded already.

Q: How many images are both misattributed to Google, and embedded in a 4th party website?
A: Query "Image Source: google * via * on Pinterest" - at least 30,000.

Q: How many are embedding images from your website?
A: Query "Image Source: mywebsite.com * via * on Pinterest"

These tips WILL NOT help you find the more literate webmasters that strip the code down to straight-up hotlinking.


Slowly, but surely, image copyright will be pinned to oblivion.

Search Engine Results As Source, and DMCA Safe Harbor

Pinterest has to be aware that nearly anything pinned from Google Image search is improperly attributed, and quite likely infringing material.

In general, to avail itself of a safe harbor protection, a service provider must show:

1. it did not have actual knowledge of the infringing material on its system;
2. if it did not have actual knowledge, it was also unaware of facts or circumstances from which the infringing activity to would be apparent; or
3. that upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness it acts expeditiously to remove or disable the materials.

How proactive must a service be in order to be protected by the sage harbor provision? The answer may be not a whole lot.

Source: Lexology
UMG argued that Veoh had the right and ability to control infringing activity and thus could not take advantage of the safe harbor protection. The Ninth Circuit rejected this argument finding that Veoh only had the necessary right and ability to control infringing activity once it had been notified of such activity. The Ninth Circuit found that merely knowing that a website can host infringing material did not satisfy the specific knowledge requirement to impose liability. Thus, the Ninth Circuit held that “the ‘right and ability to control’ under section 512(c) [of the DMCA] requires control over specific infringing activity the provider knows about” and “a service provider’s general right and ability to remove materials from its services is alone insufficient.”

The Ninth Circuit’s decision in UMG Recordings provides further clarification about the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. Service providers are encouraged to be proactive in identifying and removing infringing material upon receipt of notice that such materials exist. Such policies can help shield a service provider from liability under the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions.

If the requirement for a service like Veoh (and by extension, Pinterest) to be proactive in the removal of infringing material is limited to the time following receipt of notice, this means that creative content providers are defenseless against the army of pinners, and will have to consecrate hours upon hours of their time protecting their copyright while Ben Silbermann becomes extraordinarily rich with venture capital.

This leaves us with the option of concealing our content behind tiny thumbnails, ending its distribution on the internet altogether, or trying to educate pinners to curb their infringing activity.

No happy ending.

How To Use Pinterest Legally - Advanced Class

Take the Creative Commons challenge! Why not GO LEGIT and pin images with a Creative Commons license allowing you to do it? Sure, you have to dig deep in the search interface to reach the mother lode. But it can be done. The tips below are your gateway to legitimate pinning, safe for yourself and the creators.

Click on the wheel icon on the upper right hand corner of Google Image search page, and select "Advanced Search."


Near the bottom of the "Advanced Search" page, open the "usage rights" drop down menu and you'll find four perfectly good options that will net you images that you are free to pin to your heart's content

The good news is that there are thousands of high-quality images that are perfectly safe to pin. Really. It's a nice surprise. Be sure to mention that your pin is legit in the comment section. You'll impress all your followers with your top-notch web citizenry.

Nasty Linking Practices

THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Looking deep into Pinterest's code reveals some unsavory practices that hurt artists and photographer beyond the mere infringing upon their copyrights. Unlike copyright infringement, which is against the law, these sneaky actions are legal. What they are is a stark reminder that we are not merely dealing with gentle souls programming a nice little platform for the ladies to line up pretty pictures; we are dealing with an ugly, unscrupulous pirate without an iota of respect for artists' livelihoods.

Today, we will demonstrate that when Pinterest creates links to the original source of the material (the creator's website), Pinterest uses a sneaky "nofollow" link that tells search engine to NOT count this link towards PageRank credit for the target website. It is an instruction to the search engine bot not to follow this link for crawling and explore the creator's website, but to continue perusing Pinterest.

We will also show the flip side; when Pinterest creates links to itself, those links are NOT "nofollow" links, and that further, they are attempting to fool the search engines into thinking that "your-website-url.com" actually points to a page within Pinterest, that contains a partial aggregate of your material that has been pinned. I repeat: Pinterest attempts to fool search engines into thinking your website is on Pinterest.

The screenshots of the code below have been obscured in some places to remove identifying information.


In this screenshot, the outbound link pointing to the creator's website is a worthless, deprecated "nofollow" link. It counts for nothing in your search engine rankings, and slows down the rate at which your website would be crawled.


This snippet shows a pinned image with the alt tag "Pinned Image" pointing to the creator's website with a deprecated "nofollow" link. The significance of the "Pinned Image" anchor text is that even a search engine does not treat a "nofollow" tagged link differently, the search engine will credit the creator's website as being a "Pinned Image," sabotaging its search engine ranking with a non-specific anchor text that has nothing to do with what the image actually is.


This is a series of three thumbnail images of pins that point inward to Pinterest's page that aggregates a creator's images from a source website, on Pinterest's servers, in this format: http://pinterest.com/source/your-website-url.com. This inward link is NOT a deprecated "nofollow" link. By default, search engine bots will follow this link and continue to crawl Pinterest instead of being diverted to the creator's website. This increases the importance of the Pinterest page that aggregates your material in the eyes of search engines, and makes it float to the top of the results.

Pinterest actively hurts the source websites, while helping itself.


This last one is the nastiest of them all; using your website URL as the anchor text, Pinterest points an inward link to the page that aggregates a creator's images from the source website. This tells the search engines that they can find your website on Pinterest's servers, on this page: http://pinterest.com/source/your-website-url.com - rather than on your actual website. While search engines may not be completely fooled, they are fooled enough.

Typing my own website URL in Google's search box, the page where Pinterest aggregates my infringed content (http://pinterest.com/source/my-website-url.com) tops the page 2 results. It might be higher if I weren't so vigilant in removing infringed content.

Typing "redbubble.com" (a large image website with very heavy presence on Pinterest)in Google's search box, the page where Pinterest aggregates the infringed content (http://pinterest.com/source/redbubble.com) is the third result on page 1.

Typing "pinterest (the name of a webmaster forum)" in Google's search box, the page where Pinterest aggregates the infringed content (http://pinterest.com/source/redbubble.com) is the first result on page 1. The second result is another pinterest page. Only the third result is the webmaster forum, with Pinterest-related threads highlighted.

Pinners like to laud the "great publicity" creators are getting from having their work pinned and repinned on Pinterest. Some publicity! Pinterest's linking scheme, by design, is to steal traffic from the source websites, and decrease the share they deserve from organic search results.

The duplicate content penalties that are bound to arise, as outlined in the earlier blog post entitled: Clone Wars further compounds the problem. This post did not get the attention it deserved, it's a good idea to catch up on it.

Pinners are hypnotized by their illicit collections of pretty pictures - nearly all of them completely unaware of the unfair, underhanded way that Pinterest is trying to grab not only content, but traffic from creators. They believe that creators are getting good vibes from having their work pinned on Pinterest. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any extra trickle of traffic comes at a very high price; the loss of search engine ranking for website images, and the website as a whole, to Pinterest's benefit.

In fact, nearly all self-publishing webmasters are as unaware of the multitude of ways they are being wronged as the pinners themselves. They count visitors, check for sales. They're not looking deep into the downright evil linking scheme that in the long run, will rob them of more visitors than they will gain, while Pinterest makes millions off their work, and the visitors that should be theirs directly, without going the roundabout Pinterest way.

Pinterest is a vampire. There's nothing pretty about it.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 5

Google Image To Image Search.

The Google Image/Image search is an amazing new feature which is derived from Google's use of sophisticated image recognition functions to satisfy a need to eliminate duplicate images from Google's Image search. You may have noticed that over the years, the old problem of seeing the same picture over and over again in Image search has disappeared. Now, Google allows its users to harness this powerful tool for their own purpose. Thank you, Google.

Go to Google Images, and type in your search term, example, "widget propellers."

If you find an image that's yours on the page, click on it, and drag and drop in in the search box which will automatically enlarge when you hover over it. Like this:


Image/Image search is a revolution in your ability to detect infringements on your graphical content.

Your search result page will point out all your indexed image's twins on the internet:


Scan this search result page for images attributed to Pinterest.com.

Open in fresh tabs, collect link and image locations.

NOTE: Currently, pins appear poorly indexed in this feature. It's not impossible that Google considers Pinterest's content so likely to be duplicate content that it applies a severe penalty against it in its Image search, but this is just speculation. Using the "site:" command in Google Image does yield a bevy of Pinterest Images, so they are in fact indexed for Google Images. There are mysteries.

Finding Your Work On Pinterest PART 4

Using the SITE: command on Google.

Google's SITE: command is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to locate your content. It allows you to search a site specifically, in this example, Pinterest.com. Enter the site: command with your domain name in the format below in Google's search:

SEARCH: site:pinterest.com "mywebsite.com"


Using the site: command to locate Pinterest content misattributed to Google yields an astonishing 14.4 million results.

The search will yield both pin boards, and individual pin pages (recognizable by a URL with a long string of number). Pin boards appear to be more reliably indexed than the "deeper" pin pages, so many pin pages are actually missing from Google's database altogether and will not show up on search. Examining a pin board to find your content is a tedious chore. Use your browser search function to find your domain name on the pin board. Some pin boards have a reasonable number of pins that Pinterest serves to your browser in a single pass.

Tragically, many pin boards are little more than poorly managed electronic hoards, and scrolling to the bottom of the pin board will stimulate Pinterest to serve you another helping of pins. If you still haven't found your image, scroll down again for a third helping. To reach the bottom of a completely full pin board, you may need to repeat this 10 times. Some electronic content hoarders may even surprise you with a link to a second page when you finally reach the bottom of the first page.


Click on "more search tools" on Google Search page's left hand menu.


Some useful features include pages created or changed in the past 24 hours or past week, as well as "page not visited" if you're starting to lose track.