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Now when you search on Bing Image Search and click on an image, you will get a beautiful large display of the image and even be able to click to make it full screen. Here is a screen shot:
Bing announced this yesterday saying this makes for a better user experience. It gives you a full size image, faster loading time, easier navigation from one image to the next, and shows you size previews on the screen.
Now although it might make for a better searcher experience, webmasters are not happy.
They feel like Bing is taking their images, using their bandwidth and they are not even getting a pageview from it. A user can just look at the full image on Bing and the site itself gets no pageview from it.
A big time image search expert at WebmasterWorld calls for webmasters to block Bing from crawling and indexing their images. He explained why:
One thing is sure if you care about your images you would block all SEs like you, thats for sure. How Bing now "steel" you images is just ridiculous, they know they take a lot of visits/income from webmaster sites, but I thought we would see such a move from google first.
This is not the first time Bing upset image owners, they did so in April 2011.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Marc Winter
12/20/2012 12:30 am
This is wrong and illegal on so many levels it is mind-blowing. Even displaying the full-size image out of context without regard to the specific copyrights, which clearly violates IP laws of most countries, I totally missed they even hotlink the full size image at the same time, thus stealing my bandwidth too! And to top it off, they call people's websites "a bunch of clutter"! Naturally I blocked Bing immediately and served them a nice fat FU replacement image (referer-dependent) instead of my works. If Google ever tries this too, I will do the same. Who do these parasite companies think they are, stealing other people's content to make a fast buck with it, all the while persecuting others for doing the same with their own content?
Nanuchacha
12/20/2012 10:31 am
A truely disturbing move from the search engine which does not give me even .01 percent of the daily traffic, I get more traffic from stumble than bing. Why make your and a webmaster's life miserable. MS needs to learn a lot.
Karen
12/20/2012 04:56 pm
How can they get away with this? They are stealing images from my site and giving them away. The only way I get revenue from my site is through my images. Now users can just scrape them off from the SE without visiting my site. This is so depressing, All my hard work over the years just going to sh!t.
CoryRs
12/21/2012 02:06 pm
I'm a webmaster and this doesn't particularly bother me too much. Most of the time, when I do an image search, I don't even look at the page it came from, so what difference does it make? I don't know, I think it could be worse.
Chris
02/10/2013 04:42 am
Now Google is doing the same thing. Time for a class action law suit against both. They are breaking all copyright and fair use laws because they think they can get away with it.
Yuan Taizong
10/03/2013 09:12 am
I don't see how this bothers me, I'm also a web-master and page-views concern me less than people making usage of my awesome images.