Why Is Google Image Search So Bad

Medium writer Robert A. Stribley recently published a piece about the harmful effects that Google's changes to their image search function have had on our ability to fight fake news. It's an important story, and one that couldn't come at a worse time, given the approaching US elections.

As laudable as Stribley's article is, it's only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other problems with the revisions in addition to what he revealed that it's hard to know where to start. But let me give it a try.

First, so that everyone's up to speed, the changes I refer to were recently instituted by Google and affect the part of its search engine that generates results to queries in the form of digital images, rather than links and text. Image search on Google can be accessed directly through the URL images.google.com, or by clicking on the link labeled "Images" that appears in the menu bar at the top of any Google search results page (Screenshot 1, below).

Screenshot 1: Thumbnail images returned for the search query "Getty images." Image search can be done directly through the URL images.google.com, or by clicking on the link titled "Images" that appears in the menu bar at the top of a search results window. Composite image by the author.

Specifically, Google deleted two significant functions that customers could utilize to further their search after the results from a query appeared onscreen. Both of these functions were accessed in a window that popped up when the user clicked on any thumbnail image contained among the initial results (Screenshot 2, below).

Screenshot 2: Clicking on a thumbnail image in the search results page brings up a sub-menu with additional functions that can be performed on the selected image. Google recently removed "Search by image" and "View image," visible in the blow-up. Composite image by the author.

The first function, labeled "Search by Image," generated a fresh page with the selected image reproduced from different websites at a variety of sizes and resolutions (Screenshot 3, below). Users could then click on whatever thumbnail version best suited their purposes, and proceed accordingly.

Screenshot 3: The "Search by image" function led to a page with multiple iterations of the selected thumbnail arranged in decreasing size. The images were drawn from across the Internet. Composite image by the author.

The second deleted function, called "View Image," enabled the user to open the selected thumbnail in a new tab at its actual size— essentially, the same functionality that most browsers allow by right-clicking and selecting "Open image in new tab," except that Google's button allowed the user to go from a thumbnail in search results directly to the full-size version without having to first enter the website hosting it.

So, apart from taking away a couple of features that customers once enjoyed, what's the big deal?

Did Getty Get the Best of Google?

The first hint of a problem lies in the company's rationale for making this deeply unpopular change.

By its own admission, Google (2017 revenues $110bn, 72,053 employees) effectively reduced its usefulness to millions and millions of its customers around the world at the behest of a single privately-owned company named Getty Images (1,935 employees, revenues undisclosed). Getty had complained to the media giant that these features were cutting into its business by allowing users to locate images of the kind that it makes money from through licensing fees.

I suggest everyone let that statement sink in for a moment before reading on, because that little tidbit alone should be enough to send chills up and down our collective spines.

Drill down a little deeper, and things only grow more troubling.

The core of the conflict boils down to Getty's business model. In the Old Economy days, it was pretty simple: the company licensed the use of photographs, film footage, and music whose copyright they owned to customers in return for a fee. Fair enough.

As the content industry became increasingly digitized, however, controlling — i.e., monetizing — the lawful use of their copyrighted product in the freewheeling cyber casbah known as the Internet became much more difficult to manage.

Photograph by Sebastien Gabriel via unsplash.com

Making matters worse, a plethora of low- and no-cost stock photo websites appeared on the horizon, further threatening to decimate Getty's historically high margins. Throw in the ubiquitous smartphone shutterbug, and you've got the perfect storm for disruption in the media content business.

Like several of its competitors, Getty took steps to protect its market position. It watermarked its assets to stymie unauthorized use. It bought one of the earliest and biggest players in the cut-rate photography sector, iStockphoto, among other strategic acquisitions. Fair enough again.

Unfortunately, at the same time that the company was taking legitimate steps to navigate a changed economic landscape, it was also engaged in nefarious practices that would make other rogue actors of the New Economy (I'm looking at you, old Uber) green with envy. Or possibly admiration.

For starters, it initiated a series of coercive practices against individuals, institutions, and businesses it accused of unlawfully appropriating its copyrighted material. Among these maneuvers were repeated attempts to fool targets through misrepresentation, as described in one account:

Rather than pursue a policy of sending out "cease and desist" notices, Getty typically mails out a demand letter claiming substantial sums of damages to owners of websites which it believes have used their images in infringement of their photographers' copyright. Getty commonly tries to intimidate website owners by sending collection agents, even though a demand letter cannot create a debt.

Intimidate is right. A particularly horrific episode had Getty's hired guns trying to extract a payment of over $8,000 from a church in the UK, where a volunteer had inadvertently posted a couple of its images on the church website.

Nice. No wonder a lawyer once called Getty's terror tactics "a legalized form of extortion."

Equally outlandish is the company's trick of slapping its watermark on images for which it does not own the copyright, and then trying to peddle them to unsuspecting customers as protected goods. I've come across several instances of this deception in the course of my own image searches.

Ugh. Makes you wonder if the Google brass weren't asleep at the wheel of their self-driving cars when they acquiesced to Getty's demands.

Photograph by Michael Gaida via pixabay.com

Civilization and Its Malcontents

Only part of the problem we're dealing with here pertains to profit. Something even bigger is at stake. It's called civilization.

I know that sounds improbably bombastic. But stay with me as I make my case.

As an architect who also teaches and writes about the psychology of creative space, I do a lot of image search. Sometimes I'm looking for images of work to publish in a post or book. Sometimes I'm on the hunt for visual matter that I can use in a Keynote presentation (the Mac equivalent of PowerPoint). Sometimes I'm trying to gain a better understanding of a particular topic. Sometimes I'm looking for graphic or design inspiration.

The needs that have brought me to image search are ongoing, to where I now have thousands of digitized photographs and graphics in my database. The only way I was able to retrieve this mountain of material in the time that I did was because I was able to utilize the two features that Google has now deleted at Getty's insistence.

Photograph by David East via unplash.com

In other words, the consequence of this action is to make it harder and more time-consuming, if not downright impossible, for me to add to my knowledge of my field, and to share that knowledge with others through writing and teaching.

I'm only one person. But I am not alone. One estimate puts the number of searches on Google Images at 1 billion per day. That's billion, as in billion. Per day. Every day. Every year.

So multiply the effect that removing these tools have had on me by a very, very big number, and the potential drag on the development of human knowledge becomes palpable — enough to slow the progress of civilization itself. For what lies at the core of civilization, if not the accumulation of knowledge?

It is deeply ironic that one of the greatest progenitors of information the world has ever seen has ceded to protectionist policies reminiscent of a repressive past, and in doing so has retarded the very flow of information on which it stakes its existence — all to satisfy the narrow interests of a single privately-owned company unwilling to honestly confront the realities of a new world order.

Why did Google Do It?

Which makes me wonder. Why did Google really do this? It strains credulity to believe that an entity like Getty Images could really motivate the Internet behemoth by threatening lawsuits and the like. It's taken Yelp over six years and zillions of dollars of legal fees to make its case that it wasn't getting a fair shot on search results. How was Getty able to effect significant change with a few rattles of its comparatively small sword?

I can't say for sure, but I speculate on whether it might have something to do with Getty's acquisition by the hedge fund Carlyle Group in 2012. Considering that Carlyle paid a third more than its previous valuation to buy the company, the pressure to show returns on investment must have been severe.

Severe enough, perhaps, to prompt some creative deal-making with the folks in Mountain View?

Yes, that's right. At about the same time that users were waking up to the news that a few pistons had been removed from their favorite search engine, the two companies announced that they had signed a 'partnership' that Getty's CEO promised would "advance our mission to move the world with images," a progressive statement that is quite at odds with their having caused Earth's most visited website to hobble an existing feature set.

It will take the skills of a real investigative journalist to sniff out what really happened. Whatever lies behind the saga, this much is for sure: millions of writers and readers have been digitally kneecapped to benefit a very small population.

Photograph by Pasi Mämmelä via pixabay.com

Remedies and Dangers

So that you don't go away from this article entirely depressed, I'd like to offer up a few morsels of positive news. In particular, you'll be happy to know that there are workarounds to circumvent what Getty has wrought. Stribley lists many of them in the article I cited at the top of this piece.

For example, you dedicated Chrome and Firefox users can load extensions into your browser that will restore the deleted tools. Alternatively, you could migrate to Bing and DuckDuckGo when you need to perform an image search, since both retain the withdrawn features.

Two things to keep in mind, however, before you exhale a sigh of relief. First, a lot of people who aren't especially tech savvy are not going to read this article or any like it, and are therefore unlikely to ever know how to recover what they've lost.

Second, even as we remove the constraint imposed on us by implementing one of these workarounds, we should not lost sight of the greater danger the episode poses: if Google could be made to prioritize the parochial objectives of an ill-behaved enterprise over that of its user base once, then what's to stop another entity from causing the same to happen again? Answer: nothing, unless we in the writing community — and everyone else — register our disapproval with our actions, our clicks, and our words.