They got sued.

"These changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week."

Why would they want that?

Money from a successful lawsuit?

Lawyers are not cheap and frankly Google would lose every case because they are in the wrong.

Since Google isn’t highlighting any such absurd ruling’s specific language then there must be some other reason.

If Getty can successful sue them, then any image rights holder can do so. Making an exception for Getty images doesn't resolve the underlying general liability or infringement. That means if another rights holder were to sue them for not addressing that liability for their images, now Google are infringing wilfully and subject to punitively increased sanctions or damages. That's reason enough to apply this remedy across the board.

Thus my suspicion. What’s a little sad is 15 years ago I would give Google the benefit of the doubt, but this reminds me how times have changed.

‘Still retaining functionality’ would require assuming permissive access to images as the default, which is what has got a Google into this mess in the first place. The whole point of this is that, for sites and rights holders that don’t explicitly allow access, Google cannot assume they grant it. They have to assume the most restrictive grant of rights, and adoption of metadata to indicate more permissive access is so poorly adopted it’s just irrelevant in practice.

Try the advanced image search options, just like many other modern image search engines, as a user, you can filter for permissive licenses. I'm not sure how they gather that metadata, but the results I'm getting, it's not poorly adopted at all.

So they could in fact retain the functionality for images with the right license.

Of course, I’m sure they do this in an intelligent way rather than literally a bunch of one off kludges.

Google for that exact phrase and see who made that observation.

So the author of that observation is Sergey Brin himself. Lel.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

That's basically what Google got sued for in the EU and they lost. The friendly companies were other Google properties.

(Not to be confused with del.icio.us, which is now ... Pinboard.)

(Assuming that your post isn't a new form of Microsoft ad, that is.)

What's that then, I ducked it? :-)

I use Bing regularly. Sometimes I'll say I've binged something, but I have a hard time doing so without a little hint of sarcasm or self-awareness in my voice.

It gets weirder when people are using the term "Google-fu" - gotta say "search-fu" if you can't stomach "Bing-fu"; neither option is great.

But hey, the rewards points are redeemable for Amazon cards...

Remember: if you get a service for free, then you are the merchandise.

I get that some are dissatisfied by "paying" with ads. But the alternative would be a paid-for search engine. Not only would that potentially exclude some, it would also make it harder to access search for people from low-income countries. Currently, US and Europe subsidise operations for money other areas, allowing them to get the same search experience. That'd change with a paid-for model.

Like Wikipedia, right?

Some might argue the image is meant to be seen...in the context of the web page it's on.

Some would argue that speech in public between two people should not be overheard. But so what, the fact that some argue has limited value without lots of qualifiers.

Which part of any version of the http protocol spec covers this?

This is going to make Senior Architect PowerPoint users spend more time...

When I show my PHB why kubernetes is "the shit" and something we "really need", as I do with all my technical presentations: I get my propaganda directly from the suppliers. Am I gonna spend time visually describing how Oracles product suite hangs together? No, that's the job of someone who works at Oracle.

The sites themselves often have lower res versions in their articles, so 'view image' has repeatedly saved my bacon getting high res, clean, versions for reuse. Google Image search historically cut through the noise and got relevant images out in a highly usable format, while saving oooooodles of time digging out the appropriate graphic.

Boo!

Also, I said architect reporting to a PHB, not a PHB architect, and that the time was used creating presentations, not that the volume of presentations themselves could be 'cut down'...

-2/3

Paywalled photos as from news agencies are already published in severely reduced resolution and often with huge watermarks plastered over the entire photo, if they are even on the public web! If you're publishing paywalled photos in public, high resolution, and perfectly usable for stealing, you are doing something wrong already.

Actually, for _any_ case of content in websites, if you rely on a search engine of all things (designed to spider your website) to protect it you are doing something terribly wrong.

I wish Google would just have removed the Getty Images from their search index altogether and be done with it. If they don't want them there, just remove them all already. I hate this sort of collective punishment for the entire web just because of someone's "special interests" that honestly seem to boil down to webmasters with "special needs"!

>Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures, and the removal of the view image button is one of many changes being made in response. A deal to show copyright information and improve attribution of Getty photos was announced last week and included these changes.

Using the context menu to "Open Image in New Tab" essentially does the same thing so the functionality is still there.

No, actually “view image” loaded the source image at source resolution while viewing the image loaded into the DOM would show you the re-encoded, lower resolution, smaller Google thumbnail version.

Edit: actually it seems that Google has simultaneously deployed an update that makes the actual source image open so that might actually work.

Nothing's really changed in terms of capability; the UI is just a bit more awkward.

If you are, then that's very strange, and I have no idea why that's happening for you and not for anybody else. What browser and OS are you using?

But FYI, this is Safari on OS X.

The images don't all load automatically, though; an image only begins to load when you click on it individually, opening it within the viewer, on a Google Images results page.

Here[0] is a screenshot example. Clicking on 'Open image in new tab' (or 'View Image' in Firefox) will open the image[1] directly, and inspecting the page's source will reveal it is simply an <img> element with the URL as the src value. The size ought to make no difference; I tried up to 10 MP.

It may take a second to load, but that's how Google Images works: once an image is open in the viewer, it is quite literally just embedding the unadulterated source image within the page. It has been this way since at least 2010.

(Unless, of course, there is behaviour unique to Safari or OS X: of that I have no idea.)

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/mYAFr0J.jpg

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Winnersh...

We ban accounts that behave this way, so would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and comment only in the spirit of this site from now on? That means being scrupulously respectful of others, and generally not posting unless you have something substantive to say and can do so thoughtfully.

Edit: in this exact thread, another user too made same observation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16390022