Recall the earlier post about Google Images, which demonstrated that the index was rarely updated? Well, the folks at Google clearly were listening. When Sergey calls something embarrassing, something has to change. Now, when you query Google Images, you will see Google News images in your results. That’ll solve some of the problems, but it’s just a patch – news only archives 30 days, if memory serves. It’s quite clever, though.
Example: Arafat.
Thanks to Nathan for pointing to this.
Update: Google and others have pointed out that this has been happening since April and is not a reaction to recent events. My bad.
Google has something up their sleeve with their images. They made a change to their images bot on July 17th and have kept mum since then. Consider the traffic to my gallery since that time, with no inbound links and no advertising:
Jul: 784
Aug: 1898
Sep: 2795
Oct: 3534
Nov: 1389 so far, 4000 by EOM
Sorry, I should specify, those are all referalls from GIS bot.
I have seen these kinds of results several times, before this so-called “embarrassment”.
If it was a policy change then it should be happening to “Ashcroft” or “Tony Blair”. And results show that it is not.
I guess all of us generally rush to defend Google whenever we can.
Google Images shows Google News images since at least April 2004:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2004_04_28_index.html#108314743638362841
I had a sneaking suscpicion this wasn’t in reaction to anything. Thanks, Phillip, I should have checked first.