Authorship Now On Google Image Search. Confused?

Oct 3, 2013 - 8:17 am 12 by

Last night, I covered at Search Engine Land that Google launched authorship within Google Image Search.

Pierre Far from Google tipped us off at SMX about it and it is true, they launched it and no one knew about it - including me. Yea, even me. ;-)

Where can you find it? Go to Google Images, search for an image and click on it and you may see the authorship part, i.e. "by Author Name."

Here is an example:

Authorship On Google Image Search

Why did Google decide to put authorship on image search?

When people search for images, they aren't in a mode of asking, "who wrote this article for the picture?" They are more looking for images and who is the source of the image. Typically, on articles, the person writing the article or blog post, isn't the same person who is the source of the image. So why show authorship here?

For example, this picture of Obama shows "by Juliet Eilperin." But the image itself is by Mark Wilson from Getty Images, the story that the image is on was written by Juliet Eilperin.

obama-images-google-authorship

obama-image-google-authorship

So this is just confusing but still, neat to see.

Forum discussion at Google+.

 

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