Thomas Hawk wonders.
Now I know that Google was criticized a while back regarding the staleness of their images and that an upgrade was promised but I’d yet to see anything official announced. Over the past two weeks the traffic being driven to my site from Google’s Image Search has continued to grow and (if you combine their various international sites) Google Image Search has now become my top referring entity to thomashawk.com……
…If I do a search for “rain” under large images, my photo titled “San Francisco Rain” (see below) is on the first page of over 270,000 large images of “rain.” Wow, how did I get so lucky? Is it because the picture is actually pretty good as I’d like to believe? Is someone manually reviewing and ranking images at Google? Or is it because I publish using blogger or that I upload my photos to the internet using Hello Picasa (both Google properties)?
UPDATE: Reader Miguel Cuesta shows that Google Image has been updated – it now has Abu Gharib images, the source of the original posting on how stale the image index had gotten.
I’m not suggesting that Google isn’t updating Images, but if they are, they haven’t gotten to the word “mom” yet. Can’t remember where I saw this pointed out recently, but a search for “mom” brings up some images that are distinctively un-mommish and not safe for work. A great example of why Images is still so hit and miss.
And try searching for “DSC” which is the prefix for most Sony digital camera images. As long as Google is pulling so much info from the image file name, you’re going to end up with wildly varying results.