Clicking on my map takes me to a full size copy of the map with a greyed out image of my site behind. Closing the image takes me to my site

I want to say that I've been seeing that for, if not a year, at least the last six months.

More than a year jimbeetle, probably coming up to two years or more.

I'm still seeing that layout after "testing" started on Saturday/Sunday with the "new" one.

I've tried random searches in various browsers again today and the "old" layout, for me, is still showing. Maybe it was a huge AdWords disaster for Google and they reverted immediately?

If so then there goes the myth that Search and AdWords act independently of one another!

That's what I thought. Just confused as to why some folks were saying that was the "new" layout.

Google is officially pushing it out and says it is better for webmasters:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.

I saw a 70% drop!

At least they're adding a bit more information however the reality will soon be known and for me I'm forecasting a disaster, I'll be very happy if I'm wrong.

This is a 100% lie, of cause webmasters dont see more visits when google show full resolutions, pure lies, they are REALLY pushing there limits.

What Google cares about:

Google

Advertisers

Users

What Google doesn't care about:

Publishers

Webmasters

Online Businesses

You (personally)

You always have to keep that in mind.

Hmm I can see it yet but looking at Bings image display I can't complain on Google's. At least with Google I can go to the webpage with Bing all I can go to is the image url.

New Google image search is very similar with search at Yandex.com : [img803.imageshack.us...]

[images.yandex.com...]

I'm still not seeing the new one from last weekend again on any browser nor proxy server however according to AdSense my Coppermine Page Views were well down yesterday but my logs tell me all was normal!

Can anyone confirm that the full-size view hotlinks the image from the source server rather than using a cached copy from Google's servers? I can't seem to access the new Images version yet.

This is crucial for determining the best course of action of how to combat this blatant copyright theft...

I really feel for the owners of image gallery websites and wallpaper style sites. Google displaying the user clicked image in full resolution is nothing short of criminal. I read on the Google page introducing the change that a testbed of webmasters reported an increase in clickthroughs to their website. I'm sorry but that is utter garbage and can't be right.

I'm unsure of why Google would want to hurt image website owners in this way. Anybody?

there are so many images on the web that a few thousand angry webmasters won't make any difference. Instead of 718000 images of "farm tractor", you'll be 690000. Nobody will bat an eyelid at that.

If any sort of anti-Google Images movement gets going, they'll change the spider, forcing you to block the whole of google, search and images, if that's what you want to do.

Who has the power in this situation? (clue: it's not you!)

the water temperature continues to rise, webmaster frogs still in the pan. At what point do they say "enough!". I jumped out in 2008.

They did it because they perceive it to be what users prefer. And they're probably right.

I'm not one of the angry ones (not affected), just a bit sad for those that are, and confused why Google would think it is Ok to display the full res images and strangle the visit flow.
I predict in about 10 years the word 'internet' will be replaced by 'googlenet' there will be only one browser - chrome - which will have no address bar ha ha :-D

@netmeg Companies like Napster also delivered what the "user preferred" - free content, that is. But they made the mistake of serving music instead of images, so they got sued into oblivion.

Let's face the truth here: Pinterest, Bing, Google, Yandex etc. etc. are all having a field day with copyrighted images precisely because they know that visual artists and photographers don't have the sort of powerful lobby that the film and music industry has. Laws only matter when someone enforces them, or fights for them.

I blocked Googlebot-Image from my image folder on one site quite a few months ago, but I notice they're still showing images from within that folder. Do I need to block this bot from the whole site, or is it just particularly slow to update?

I'm not keen on this new layout at all. Images aren't a huge driver for my traffic, but I want people to see them in the context of the rest of my pages, not in full on Google.

Can anyone confirm that the full-size view hotlinks the image from the source server rather than using a cached copy from Google's servers?

According to Google:

The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view.

I assume this means they will be displaying a cached copy of their own.

This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers,

I wonder what size image they will use since, when I tested it last weekend, it showed up to about a 600 x 600 and anything larger was shown smaller. For the last year or so all of my images have been watermarked and created either at 600 x 800 or 800 x 600 ... different widget images for different widget purposes in case you're wondering.

and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews.

I have to agree that this is a very valid point. I have thousands of unique and original specialist widget images with many visitors simply viewing those images either for project ideas or to confirm what they may have seen at a dealer's was correctly named and also to view the variation of the product...it's natural...

Obviously the CTR is very low but if visitors still click through I'll be more than happy but if they simply surf Google images and I get nothing, well, I'll just have to re-think how I present them and I already have that in mind.

If you are on Apache servers, you can add a line to an .htaccess file in the directory where your images are:

Header append X-Robots-Tag: noindex

to prevent your images from being indexed (in the future, anyway). This adds a noindex metatag to your images AND any other files in the directory served by that .htaccess file - so it is not for your site's .htaccess file or all your files will be noindexed.

Here is one line from an access log to show that not only do they not use an image from cache, but Google Web Preview, just like BingPreview fetches ALL files that accompany the images they show, including javascript and .css files:

66.249.82.117 - - [24/Jan/2013:08:12:53 -0700] "GET /pop.js HTTP/1.1" 200 596 "http://www.example.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/22.0.1229 Safari/537.4"

Look at your raw access files and you can see for yourself.

EDIT: @ HuskyPup - Maybe they mean they will no longer be doing this iframe loading with their new implementation (?) that would give you more control and if they are loading from their cache then I will unblock their preview acess. It would be nice to know when they plan to do this?

Can anyone confirm that the full-size view hotlinks the image from the source server rather than using a cached copy from Google's servers? I can't seem to access the new Images version yet.

Shows a cached version first (upscaled and fuzzy), loads the larger image in the background from the source server. Google keeps the visitor, we pay for the bandwidth.

Edit: Also loads the larger version of the previous and the next image results (from source server).

Edit2: If the visitor is using https, there is no referer for image request. For http, the referer is 'http://www.google.com/blank.html'

Ah...it's re-appeared for me now.

Shows a cached version first (upscaled and fuzzy),

Yep, it'll be interesting to see how it goes since it is certainly better than last weekend's attempt at hiding the image origin.

Hmmmm ... So far today image gallery 0% CTR therefore $0 AdSense earnings, Page Views definitely down....this is looking like last Sunday's debacle.

min 30% traffic DOWN today with this new image layout .. even if is only in Chrome!

anyone can confirm?

New Google image search is very similar with search at Yandex.com : [img803.imageshack.us...]

[images.yandex.com...]

Thanks for mentioning Yandex. I added them to the anti-hotlink list in my htaccess.

Google Web Preview, just like BingPreview fetches ALL files that accompany the images they show, including javascript and .css files:
66.249.82.117 - - [24/Jan/2013:08:12:53 -0700] "GET /pop.js HTTP/1.1" 200 596 "http://www.example.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/22.0.1229 Safari/537.4"

Dog Bites Man?

Of course they have to load your css. How else could they show what the page looks like? It's when they try to get into piwik.php that I absolutely draw the line. Bad enough that they load up piwik.js, which itself is a fairly plump file.

anyone can confirm?

Same for me so far plus AdSense earnings have completely stopped, I haven't had ONE click in the last hour and three-quarters...it's a repeat of last Sunday for me, failure Google, total failure, don't give me your BS.

I wonder what size image they will use since, when I tested it last weekend, it showed up to about a 600 x 600 and anything larger was shown smaller. For the last year or so all of my images have been watermarked and created either at 600 x 800 or 800 x 600 ... different widget images for different widget purposes in case you're wondering.

Size of selected (one click) images on result page is resizable, it depends of your screen resolution (They use responsive web design). Maximum (I have 1920 px res.) is about 1100px width but can resize automatically if you use mobile devices, tablets etc.

Big problem is that google serve your big picture in results - full size, using traffic of your server and people who search thru images (google results) tend to fast inspect/preview many pics before maybe click on one...maybe click!... and why should even click when they already have big size picture and how to attract people to visit your website with this new system...

You will spend more traffic I'm 100% confident in it, and don't earn money at all from image search!

New Google image search is content farm on steroids !

Example picture - image info from google search:

[img856.imageshack.us...]

Yay that's the way to kill us Google!

Visitors to my Coppermine gallery have all but stopped, 14 pages in the last 3 hours, however my AdSense Coppermine Page Views continue to rise, into the thousands already today YET my earnings have been ZERO since people are simply clicking on the original image button, Google's drawing on it, they view it and then obviously leave.

Overall that specific site has gone from a January average of 1.09% CTR and is currently 0.39% with 0.00% over the past 3 hours or so, Adsense earnings so far today for that site are 20.4%

Across all my sites so far today earnings are 31.8% however I reckon it's only that high simply because it was earning money until the new layout came in across the board.

Therefore Google I'll call you big fat liars, people are NOT going through to the original site insofar as my sites are concerned and with AdSense earnings at this level you will be gone after the weekend if things do not change for me.

Is anyone seeing ANY increase in CTR to their images?

There is a Goog **ore in my niche from Western Europe(19 sites, most EMDs) and one in CINA. Both hire $.15 per image "professionals" to take the snaps. Hi Res. Every Item is Unique. They dominate the Goog Image Search, Bing Image search and run extensive campaigns to pollute Pinterst(not that I care much).

There several parts of Image compositions that we took in 07/08, or so, that are cutout from the originals and referenced on .eu, .cn, .ru, ua, dot anything . ... domains that point to gstatic cached links that generate images via base 64 string(data:78456nf895ty4t..) instead of hot-linking. Click Other sizes in Goog Image search.

Last week Bing was outright banned, this week Goog is next.

New mode:

Google currently trying to fool us, it also spins a new hybrid view!

[img59.imageshack.us...]

First 4 results have description on image and they are directly clickable - if you click on this results you will go straight to source website (this is only right way for image search in my opinion). Rest results working like before changes (iframe)

I think they trying to reduce damage they have done to web sites and after few days to adjust us to the new look search.

What splodge .. someone in Google needs to get fired !