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A WebmasterWorld thread has some members who focus on watching Google Image results stating that Google Images is now better at figuring out who the original source is.
One SEO said:
I'm doing the happy jig at the moment, my competitor just had the snot beaten out of his/her image rankings. For years they would have a set of top images in search for every query but the images were hotlinked from their sources (primarily classifieds sites, galleries etc) and not really hosted by the competitor.While doing a routine check of my image rankings for particular keywords I noticed that the top 4-5 images for one search had remained the same but the source had changed. These used to be my competitors rankings, but not anymore, now the source was ranked.
Others also confirmed the change.
I am not sure how many people noticed this or not but I certainly hope it is true.
It is terribly challenging for Google to find the true original source of an image or even content. If they did, at least even 75% of the time, I would be amazed and in awe.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update & Confirmed: Google has confirmed this saying:
"We've recently launched an update to the algorithm that looks at the relevance and quality of both the webpage and the image to surface more relevant results in Google Images. Improving the quality of results in Google Images is very important to us, and we're always working hard to improve our algorithms.
Comments:
Rick Bucich
08/10/2011 02:03 pm
I've been noticing some rapid changes in how things are indexed (wrote about it over at SEOMoz) so the Image folks have been busy. I'd be curious to know whether the competitor mentioned in the post had been hit with the moderate filter or in fact Google has partially figured out proper attribution. I saw someone yesterday complaining to Matt Cutts that their Flickr images were out ranked by someone who had embedded them in blog posts and had provided link attribution. They were using the drag & drop search technique, not a keyword search.
Thos003
08/10/2011 11:40 pm
I have seen problems with Google properly associating the original image when the original is on Flickr. It seems that other sites rank in the image search but not Flickr. Perhaps I should test Picasa or Panoramio to see if Google likes those sites better.
Ankit
08/11/2011 05:50 am
I too noticed some positive changes in image search as more specific images are coming up now. Earlier there used to be some junk unrelated images always on the results page which has reduced considerably at least on page #1
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08/11/2011 11:51 am
Positive changes are coming towards my site from some time ago and my site's ranking is getting better day by day.May be Google images are playing good role in it but i am not sure.
Kaloyan Banev
08/11/2011 01:17 pm
Image recognitions are still very basic as it requires a lot of power. Even original source can be improved with Photoshop and a bit of crop and alignment can improve image dramatically.
Amelia Stevenson
08/11/2011 04:18 pm
Thanks for this post. This is a great service update from Google. Showing original Google images sources is tantamount to obtaining original content. Here's hoping the search engine giant works to filter irrelevant results as well.
john lewis uk
08/12/2011 11:09 am
The image service of Google is just awesome. Am thank full for Google for this feature. Now a days am also focusing on image optimization.
Webnauts
11/28/2011 11:16 am
I do not think it should be challenging for Google to find the true original source, if such a utility already exist. Do you know TinyEye? http://www.tineye.com/