Google Image Search

Well, this blog was set-up as an experiment in seeing if I could drive page hits by providing SEO images that were labeled in the public domain. In other words, I wanted people to find what they were looking for to use in presentations, blogs, etc., via Google Image Search with the usage rights set to "free to use, share or modify, even commercially" because there was a dearth of these images to be found. I've never really delved into how I went about achieving that goal, but it appears to be failing rather quickly, in part due to Google's well intentioned update of their image search engine. First of all, it took me awhile to figure out how to get images to show up in the "free to use..." setting. After I traced the setting to Creative Commons, I then slapped several of the latest Creative Commons licenses on my blog, on individual posts, on my floor, and met with absolutely no success. Finally, I had the brilliant idea to find blogspot images that were labeled that way and use that license. Turns out the license at the bottom of this blog is way out of date, but it is the only one Google Images recognizes as of this blog post date. In other words, Google has not been keeping up with the license updates. Who can blame them? Creative Commons has no teeth; no one is enforcing it, sort of like when the NIH was in charge of blood prior to the 1970s. I digress. Nevertheless, there are people who want to make their images public domain, and no one can find them that way. I saw someone complaining that Wikipedia images labeled for reuse aren't showing up. No kidding: Wikipedia uses the latest licenses from Creative Commons. Now with this last update, webmasters are going crazy that people are able to see full resolution images without having to click through to their website and then possibly click on ads to drive revenue. I've never added ads to this blog, though I may have had to if I ever reached maximum image storage capacity. In any case, with the new image search it appears my new images aren't getting indexed, and for some reason, neither are the blog posts. There seems to be some maximum number of images that are displayed when you use the "site:domain" in the search bar for images. While it may not be good content, it is unique, and I've yet to find anyone else if having this problem. Everyone else seems to be having the problem of decreased page hits, on the order of 50%, which I've also seen. I can't complain about the bandwith problem associated with the new image search hotlinking everything since Google kindly provides my bandwith gratis. Long story short is, until I figure this problem out, there is no need to post everyday.