Google Image Search???

[TVB]

Hiya,

I've just started to notice a bunch of log entries going back to something calledGoogle Image Search (http://images.google.com/)

Here's an (and there's a ton of them in my logs all going back to the same image best I can tell) actual example (http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=www.bodieslikeours.org/images/NavBar_fig.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.bodieslikeours.org/recent_news/splash.htm&h=454&w=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgirl%2Bgenitalia%26svnum%3D20%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie %3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG&frame=small)

Anyone know anything about this? Is it something new that google is doing? How can I stop it from happening?

Best, as always...

Betsy Driver

[Jeff]

See this post by chrisheng:
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=61922#post61922

Originally posted by chrisheng:
As I understand it, Google Images actually makes a thumbnail of your images and stores it on their server. I actually keep out the Google images bot (robot) from my site with a robots.txt file that includes the following 2 lines:


User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /


In fact, the other image indexer that you might want to watch out for is Picsearch. You can keep that one from accessing your images by adding the following two lines to your robots.txt file:


User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

[Arthur]

Hi Betsy,

Google has had this for a long time now. There are many ways to stop it, you can find more information on http://images.google.com/remove.html

If you still want to be listed in Google, but don't wan't your images indexed in the Image Search, then the best way would be to add Googlebot-Image to your robots.txt files (in your www directory).

--Arthur

[george_c]

Is there any particular reason why most sites would want their images indexed by Google?

[TVB]

Great...and thank-you. I guess the image robot just found us thus the large number of entries. I want (read=need) to be in google so I'll do the robot.txt file.

Thanks guys

Betsy

[Andilinks]

Originally posted by george_c:
Is there any particular reason why most sites would want their images indexed by Google? I've wondered this myself, seems to be a service for people who like to "borrow" images. I would use cryptic file names for my images if I used many.

Andi

[zmax]

It seems that the .htaccess directives to disallow linking images from your site on another site also disallow these images from showing up on google even if they indexed them. I know cause I went and looked at my images on google when backtracking from my stats file. However it does end up taking a bit of bandwidth anyway so Ill use that robots.txt directive too!

David

[Andilinks]

I just checked Google's cached version of my pages and its images are linked to my domain... So if Google can't index those the cached version will display without images. I'll still go with cryptic file names, no one will search for them, therefore no one will find them. I guess...

Andi

[Charles Capps]

The search isn't just based on the file name - it uses text around the image to help describe it as well. So unless you intend to use both cryptic names and cryptic wording around your images.... ;)