One of the follow up tweets is more honest:

>For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week (see also https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v... …). They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value.

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964279749802512384

I'm perfectly fine with this, after all they have little choice because of the result from the Getty case, but now that option is gone they need to crack down on sites presenting different images when referred directly from Google than they present more generally: presenting an unaltered image to Google and a heavily watermarked one otherwise for instance, or sometimes the destination page redirecting off to something else if your request doesn't include a Google referrer or agent-string. These things are already against Google's policy and is basically the destination site being dishonest to the user (drawing people away from sites with the same content really but don't pretend to offer something else freely).

I noticed yesterday that you will get image results from YouTube but there’s no way to get the actual image it presents you. If you click on the search result it just takes you to the video.

So I guess they need to start by enforcing the rules on their own sites.

In case you are curious, you can get the image by going to https://img.youtube.com/vi/<insert-youtube-video-id-here>/0.... [0]

E.g. https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/0.jpg

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2068344/how-do-i-get-a-y...

Thank you, very helpful! In Firefox you can make a Keyword Search shortcut for this by: - bookmark the above page - edit bookmark - replace <...video-id...> with "%s" - enter a keyword (e.g., "yi") - enter "yi 6e5B7EKVg48" in the location bar to find the image from a video (replace 6e5B7EKVg48 with your video's ID)

Good tip. I would add that maxresdefault.jpg returns a higher resolution image, e.g.: https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/maxresdefault.jpg

Google, just give me the option to ignore Getty images altogether.

Why does Google always think they know what is best for me?

> Why does Google always think they know what is best for me?

This is the entire ethos of the "AI Revolution" in tech. The algorithm "knows what is best for you". This will only get worse with more "AI" being applied to more tech.

This is my gripe with Facebook and why I stopped using it. Biaaaaootch, I added people to my friends list because I want to see their posts. Ditch the dang algorithm and literally just show me everyone’s posts, in chronological order. That’s all you literally have to do. Don’t worry about me getting annoyed by spam, idiots who abuse their status updates will be blocked or defriended by me and everyone else who isnt having it. It’s self-policing. My discretion and the discretion of people on the platform is better than your dumb algorithm. But now I don’t use your app at all, because you thought you knew what’s best for me, and I kept missing out on people’s posts that I did in fact want to see, and that pissed me off more than whatever you’re trying to keep off of my newsfeed.

Your value proposition is having my entire social network on one feed. You’ve done that. That’s all you have to do. Ditch the algorithm.

Yeah, the biggest problem with these types of algorithms is that they show that the application developers don't trust the user to know what they want and trust the user to fix their own problems.

It's one thing for an application to provide sensible defaults. It's another thing entirely if it just second guesses the user.

The sad thing is the algorithm fixed zero problems for me. And it introduced the problem of hiding things that I did in fact want to see.. for no good reason other than apparently for their engineers to feel like they did something. Because how can they justify their paychecks when the newsfeed sorting order hasn’t changed since its prime of ~2009?

I often see a great deal of contempt for users here on HN, why should Facebook etc. be any different?

You can view "most recent" posts and that will do exactly what you're saying you want.

You must not use that feature very often or else you would know that Facebook does not respect that setting. When you set it, come back in a day or two and they’ve switched it back. Because once again, they know what’s best for you. You don’t know what you want, even if it’s not default and you go through the trouble of turning it on.

Tried it and got tired of randomly noticing that it’s not showing me “most recent” any more, and not knowing at what point in time they had switched it back on me, and what I might have missed that I would have wanted to see during that time. You have to religiously go through the process of seeing if it’s set to “most recent” every time you visit. FOH.

Actually I didn't even know it's supposed to stay in the most recent settings. I just go and click on it every time I open FB.

you make it sound so easy. It’s a hassle. It’s not like it’s always switched off when you come back. Sometimes it is sometimes it isn’t. So you have to navigate to a switch even if you’re not going to toggle it just to be sure that you’re getting the experience that you had explicitly expressed you want by switching away from the default to begin with. Why does it even switch back? They don’t think you’re capable of making your own decisions?

I just go there every time and make sure it is switched the way I like. I never said it is easy nor that I agree with their way of doing things, but the fact that sometimes it is set up like I want it to be does not make it a bigger hassle, it's exactly the same.

Except for the fact that Facebook keeps changing that back

Not just the AI revolution. For over a decade, I've grown increasingly frustrated with software suffering from overly-clever syndrome.

I'd rather use software that is predictable than predictive.

Too bad those algorithms don't know when I'm yelling at my computer because it's fucking up

If only folks on HN wouldn’t be so paranoid about microphones...

The problem with AI is that we are building it, with all our biases.

They don't. You decided to use Google's image search service, and that's what you got.

I think other sites could follow the Getty precedent and sue Google so they have no choice, at least within USA. Still, the PR spin in the message is just funny, it really made me feel "empowered" and "excited" :D

DDG still works anyway, so it's not like I have no choice if I need to quickly find an image.

This. People can be angry at Google but they have to respect a ruling from a US judge. And you can bet that there are a lot of vultures out there willing to sue Google.

Today its Getty tomorrow some blogger hoping to make a dollar.

> they have to respect a ruling from a US judge

It's not the US, it's the EU, and it's not a ruling from a judge, it's an agreement directly with Getty.

http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-files-competition-...

http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-and-google-announc...

Thanks for pointing this out!

I guess the enthusiasm regarding technology as a solution to the problems of humanity was unfounded and it needs to revert back to politics, hacking people...

1. Try adding "-getty" to your image search

2. For the more general problem of searching free images only try hitting tools -> usage rights and select as desired

Yes, but that doesn't enable the "view image" button.

Wow, that still works. I'd largely given up on + and - lately.

'+' is dead, but you can (usually?) fake its role via quote-wrapping individual words - it'll force their presence like a full quoted string, but won't require them in sequence.

'-' is still working. It also works with the 'site:' tag, so you can do things like '-site:w3schools.com'.

> -' is still working. It also works with the 'site:' tag, so you can do things like '-site:w3schools.com'

It would be interesting for google to globally A/B test “-site:w3schools.com” as a hidden default and see if their crawlers detect less overall brokenness in the web six months later.

It’ll work until they launch a Google- product.

I still use them (replace + with quotes around the word), along with searches for quoted words. Sometimes you have to click the "search for what I typed, not the spell-corrected version" button, though.

Every couple of months something like this happens and people bash the companies that did it while simultaneously there are posts where screams of how great AI will be at predicting what we want, and then executing it based on all the information harvesting.

One option is to go to advanced search, where you can change the search to restrict only to Free or other less restrictive licenses than commercial.

https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search?biw=1404&bih=67... as a sample, and more detail at https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/29508?p=ws_image...

You can already do this with search operators:

cat pictures -site:gettyimages.com

They do, just add -site:gettyimages.com to your search.

Because they know what is best for the least common denominator, if you aren't part of the target product pool, using them is a disservice to your-self.

You know, it's gotta be said that Google just shitting all over copyright just because they're big isn't ideal, either. They should be honest about their motivations, though.

Yeah, right. Because linking to an image on a publicy accessible web server is shitting all over copyright law. Also, it strongly implies that the link creator hates puppies.

Can we thank getty by popularizing free photography sites like unsplash? Any other alternatives?

Quite a few as it turns out

https://github.com/neutraltone/awesome-stock-resources

OT-ish: for such questions there is an excellent web-app:

https://alternativeto.net/browse/search?q=unsplash

… reveals several services, but personally cannot judge. (TBH, haven't known even Unsplash -- thanks for that.)

It would be more honest if "in part" meant 99%-100% of the reason to do it.

It's the same shit that happened to Google Books, really.

I feel somewhat angry at this tweet. Not because the feature is gone but because they are daft enough to assume that they can sell this as an improvement to their users and anyone will believe it.

>> Not because the feature is gone but because they are daft enough to assume that they can sell this as an improvement to their users and anyone will believe it.

Imagine how users would feel if they said "We're making this change because people keep ripping off images via our search. Since the public can't be trusted to follow copyright law, we're not going to make it so easy to break."

I'm sure the public would eat that s* up and ask for seconds.

If nothing else, it would be refreshingly honest.

The issue is about closing a loophole. If it was framed that way people would still be upset, but not as upset in the same way as being treated like idiots.

I'm waiting for the first person to sue google because chrome allows people to view the source of the page violating their copyright, or right click save as to save an image from the site and thus violating copyright and google pitching that as an improvement to the browser

If the alternative would have been to disable the feature altogether, then this is an improvement.

But to make this clear, they'd probably have to disable the feature for 2 days "because of the Getty case", then come up with this as a compromise.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, but have nothing to do with that stuff nor any special insights)

To be more precise, eliminating convenience rather than removing the feature as a whole is preferable to removal, not an "improvement".

As an aside, I've often used "View Image" to access the image when the page itself didn't contain it. This actually hurts not only user experience, but also the actual success of the platform at its intended purpose.

I dont understand why they couldnt disable that feature for only companies that wanted it (through robots.txt) or redacted it some and gave the user to drop taht website from your search.

They aren't, they don't, and they simply don't care. That's the defining feature of PR-speak: they're lying, they know they're lying, they know you know they're lying, and they just don't care.

They have to say that, no matter whether they mean it.

What else could they say that wouldn't anger Getty Images?

"We're changing this to comply with a court order / settlement." seems fine to me. I don't think anyone would be angry at them, since they didn't want to do the change nor would be "lying" to users about why they do it.

But then they wouldn't get to act like they are masters of all they survey. This way, they can continue to claim that they are always entirely in control. At least to themselves.

It's probably as banal as trying to limit future lawsuits by restricting publicity on successful past ones.

Indeed that would be a much more elegant way to go about it.

Google is now a firm part of establishment, i.e. protecting the old ways of making money instead of inventing new ones. They initially looked like a company that could find better ways but it seems like prevailing winds were stronger in the end. The "to help connect users and useful websites" while removing that possibility is just usual expected spin associated with classical businesses. YouTube is also turning into an expensive lower-quality cable TV. How innovative!

Speaking of cable TV -- back in the 80s and 90s, Nickelodeon was groundbreaking. Today it's basically Disney Channel 2. Anything that rebelsagainst cable TV will end up looking like cable TV,just like the cable networks rebelled against the status quo before becoming the status quo. Maybe what we have is a sort of local maximum, a formula that best "works" for our local culture.

That's known as 'the structure of scientific revolutions' but it applies to revolution/innovation in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

The book is free online.

I know this doesn't really add to the discussion but thanks for the reference.

> Google is now a firm part of establishment

They have been for a while now. They have a deal with the washingtonpost and nytimes to "feature" those two newspapers on google news and search. Check the waybackmachine and see how frequently washingtonpost and nytimes articles were on google news five years ago to now. It's incredible how prominently those two newspapers, but especially washingtonpost, are promoted on google now.

It also extends to their other properties like youtube. Look how heavily they are promoting kimmel, john oliver and other late night shows now.

But it applies to almost all of tech. The pressure put on tech by the establishment and their propaganda organs was too much.

Even HN is openly supporting the washingtonpost, nytimes and the establishment. I believe the mods called it "the standard". A "hacker" news site supporting establishment mouth pieces. Years ago, washingtonpost and the nytimes were scorned by HN. It's amazing how things change.

What's your problem with WaPo and NYT? Where should I go for news instead?

next stop: EME-wrapped (DRM) images

sounds like yegge was actually right

I agree on the general point. Corporate culture and the meaningless ways of talking that go with it are both (a) extremely dominant part of overall culture and (b) extremely disengenious and repressed. We talk like this a lot, among colleagues, to customers, politicians talk this way.

I'm not sure what's going on here though. It definitely isn't "some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites." It's probably more to do with the fact that Google images is designed for viewing images, not finding links and that kind of makes it a content scraping site.

The idea that Google (or anyone) would speak normally (like a googler would speak, in a cafe) is oddly insane.

"After years of complaints and some lawsuits, we've decided to bite the bullet and take away the damned view image button. People use google images by searching for a thing and looking at the pictures. They don't really visit the website because well... they're looking for pictures not some random website that happens to have a picture. That means this isn't really a websearch site. It's pinterest with stolen content. Basically, Google images is kind of ilegal, but still dead useful. Hopefully this change will get the most litiguous photographers off our case and it'll be more or less business as usual."

I guess in this case speaking plainly actually does have nasty legal implications, but we do corporate speak regardless.

When OKCupid killed their app by making it a poorly implemented tinder clone with vestigial features, they pretended they had just discovered new and exciting things about first names, swiping and such.

Would it have really harmed them to say, real names are more normal now. Tinder is eating our lunch. Our average user keeps getting older. Our UI isn't as good for mobile or whatever reasons really drove those decisions. I'd be more interested in reading it then.

At the very least, ommit the meaningless stuff. Just say we're taking away this button and don't give a reason.

It would feel incredibly odd to lie like this between unincorporated natural persons in a noncommercial setting. Can you imagine telling your friends you'll noshow a bbq with some corproate-speak nonsense?.

It is not non-sense or meaningless though, and thinking that is dangerous. It is corporate propaganda and it is outrageously effective at shaping thought both internally and externally (internally being, perhaps, the most important portion). Linguistically speaking, the language we use has a material impact on how we think about the underlying ideas.

Good point. I guess a lot of what we say generally, doesn't have explicit meaning. That doesn't mean it's the same as silence, it's quite impactful.

> I am still surprised how easily corporations will hide their true motives, resolve any cognitive dissonance internally, and how easily others will forgive them.

People stopped caring a long time ago. It's became a new social norm. A corporation can't speak openly, they always need to "act in the best interest of the customer" and use other bs phrases. This battle has long been lost. Not just corporations - startups are equally bad, especially when recruiting employees who are supposed to work hard for their success.

There's a reason a lot of people choose not to work there.

Google still manages to get far too many non-sociopathic employees, by feeding them a supernormal[1] morality surrogate ("googley values") industrially designed to draw moral attention away from Google. Many employees actually start to perceive whatever they do at Google as "good" because Google has these supernormally good "googley values" of Google's own manufacture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

I think it's more the $200k salaries and badge of having Google on your resume.

(Asking out of curiosity and not trying to be a smartass) But is Google still that impressive of a note on your résumé these days?

Most of the brightest students from my university off to work for or start innovative startups solving hard problems or they got research jobs at various engineering/energy companies, but a large number who were just kind of OK students got some fuzzy job at google doing who knows what but getting paid a lot to be there.

Sometimes I'm shocked by the dumb designs and whatnot that google puts out these days and wonder what kind of people they have making these decisions, then I think back to some of the people I went to school with and things start to click.

yes - look at LinkedIn people who used to work at Google and where they work now. Try 100+ samples.

Just like any large company there is a huge variety of work being done and varying degrees of competency among employees. Sure, there are some people who fit your description, but there are also lots of people doing cutting edge work that is absolutely impressive.

They -like every other hyper corporation- are starting to speak not like Governments but like sects.

> "Ultimately, Google Images is a way for people to discover information in cases where browsing images is a better experience than text."

That's my primary use of Google Images. I find that for a lot of things (at least things I'm searching for), that helps cut through a lot of the spam or generally lesser quality sites, even if the image itself isn't all that important to my search. Also, it's excellent when I don't know the specific name for an object... just use the best search terms I can think of for the object then browse images until I see one that's what I'm thinking of (or looks like it could be used for what I'm thinking of).

That said, I've also used it for grabbing images of something. But more and more often, I've used it just for searching in general.

> Do you believe any of these statements?

Well, technically "to help connect users and useful websites" is true.

You now have to visit the website that had the photo if you want to download the full-size version, whereas previously you could bypass the site and download it from Google Images directly.

In the same sense that ads "inform you about the existence of useful products".

It's technically true but also completely irrelevant.

> You now have to visit the website that had the photo if you want to download the full-size version, whereas previously you could bypass the site and download it from Google Images directly.

I'm guessing that soon we'll have a browser extension that will do it for us.

This new move is QUITE annoying on mobile.

After a tip I've switched to an alternative search engine that still works in the old fashion

https://www.startpage.com/

I don't normally do this because we aren't Reddit here, after all. But this is stupidly appropriate.

https://www.xkcd.com/1475/

Sorry but I do not understand Google's hidden motives behind this. Can you elaborate?

I'm sure it doesn't feel like they work for a stereotypical evil corporation or anything like that.

As soon as a big corporation tells you something is for your benefit you should check the contents of your pockets and make sure all your fingers are still there. It's a sure sign something has gone missing.

Any horrible task can be split up and thus be made more fullfillable by the human employed in the process.

Lets assume for example, google found some Xenomorphs on the moon- which needed a human host to be transfered to a research lab in moutain view.

Instead of having one person do it, the task will be split up.

There is one doctor making sure the human hosts are fine.

There is a transport pilot flying the human hosts to the moon.

...

There is a grief counselor contacting the hosts familys.

There is another transport pilot flying them home.

Finally there is one person who designs the process, not knowing exactly what will be extracted.

And of course a person who tells a nice PR-lie.

Its the same distribution of organization that made Auschwitz run so well.

Now repeat after me- do not be evil.

"Any horrible task can be split up and thus be made more fullfillable by the human employed in the process."

I think you're onto something here but I think there is a detail you've missed - hierarchy.

It's not the number of people involved that allows a a terrible process to be completed but rather the number of layers of hierarchy.

Someone at the top says "just make this (outcome) happen" and if they say that to the person who actually has to carry it out, there is pushback or guilt or exposure. But if that person can, in turn, tell someone else a level below to "just make this (outcome) happen" eventually there is enough insulation (emotional, legal, etc.) that someone at the end of the chain can get the shaft.

You can't really do that with a flat (absent) hierarchy.

Honesty has a cost.

Yes, for bad actors