Follow up to: Some Explaining and Some Google Image Zebra News and Velociraptor Awareness Day

Not too long ago, I wrote about how one of my essays was featured on Reddit. But that was just a side event to the longer flirtation with fame I’ve had with Google images. It started slightly more than two years ago, when the zebra picture I hosted made it into the top images on Google. The zebra picture then slided into a pattern of being on again and off again and my attempt to manually replicate this pattern failed.

What was interesting was how I got the #2 spot for zebra, given that the picture of the zebra that I had posted on my site was from Google Images itself. All I did was go to Google Image Search, type in “zebra”, grab the most appropriate picture, and then uploaded it to my own server, and put it in the essay. Then, for some reason, Google decided that my duplicate was more worthy of a proud search rank than the one that I had originally seen; apologies to GoPetsOnline and their zebra picture.

Even more interesting was that the spot would occasionally trade back and forth between me and the GoPetsOnline “orignal” image, without any obvious reason as to why this was the case. Such an oscillation makes figuring out how Google Images works even harder.

But now Google is messing with me again. Google has given me yet another image search term to be proud of. No longer will be I be known as the #2 holder for “zebra”, for now I have had another title foisted upon me through no work of my own: I am now the owner of the #1 search result for “velociraptor” for the velociraptor picture featured in. Needless to say, this is a nerd dream come true.

And also needless to reiterate (but it will be reiterated anyway), the whole reason I was able to find that picture of a velociraptor was because I went to Google Images, typed in “velociraptor”, picked the first image I liked, uploaded it to my server, and put it in my essay. I win at the Google Image Lottery, it seems, by pure luck.

So with my #1 in “velociraptor”, my #2 in “zebra”, my #4 in “graduate”, and my #7 in “phaser”, it seems I am building quite the collection of Google Image results.

Traffic Through Google Images

There’s a huge difference between having a good rank in Google Images and having a good rank in the main, text-based search engine. If you have a good result in the text-based search engine, people will google what they want, and look directly at the linked page. Heck, they may even read it. And if you’re really lucky, they’ll read it, like it, bookmark your website, and visit it every weekday.

A high result on Google Images is much different. Unfortunately, it’s not very advantageous to appear in Google Images, because when people click the link on Google, they don’t go to your site directly — instead, they just go to the Google Images frame, and then directly to the image they want, without even seeing your content, let alone reading it, liking it, and visiting every weekday.

With Google Images, you do get about a thousand unique visitors visiting your website every day… but none of them actually visit your website. None of them see anything. So all this is basically a wash.

Or Perhaps?

So instead of watching the visitors fly by, I decided to do something. I set a script that whenever someone visited the zebra page in the Google Images frame, they would be redirected to this website of mine. On the page, I would tell people about what had happened with the google ranking, tell them about my website, and ask them to give it a visit.

Of course, this still didn’t change much. Only about 10% of the people actually clicked through and gave my website a visit, and there’s little indication that any of the people coming for that zebra image actually decided to stay around. But no matter, for I can gain readership in other ways; to the degree that I even care about readership at all. I’m still occasionally hoping my website will go big one of these days and garner dozens of insightful comments and feedback a day, but otherwise I don’t really mind. (Maybe if you remember visiting this site because of the zebra and have stuck around, you could give me an inspiring comment.)

Revisiting Google Images Theory

The good news is that this does give me enough information to update my two year old theory about how Google Images works. Earlier, I thought that Google determined images based on the name of the image file, the alt text, and the surrounding text, saying:

Current experimentation shows that the text closest to, but before, the image is given the most priority; with the text closest to, but after, the image given the second most priority. It’s assumed, but not clear, that distance trumps before-after.

But, of course, my ensuing experiment failed. I was clearly missing something. Now I think I know what that missing element is. It’s the way Google handles everything else — the concept of the backlink. Google counts the number of pages linking to your page, and notes the number of pages that linked to that page, etc. The site that has the most other sites “pointing” to it is the site that wins the highest result.

This is also how Google Bombs can be made — get enough people to link to a website (say George W. Bush’s Wikipedia entry) using the desired search term (say “miserable failure“), and eventually we google search “miserable failure” and see George W. Bush’s Wikipedia entry in the top results.

Back Links for Images

It turns out that me getting the “velociraptor” result lends some evidence that Google does backlinks for images as well. Specifically, Brian Green’s Blog posted an essay titled “Quick Raptor Attack” that directly linked to my velociraptor image. It seemed that doing so helped get me my position in Google Images.

Nessie and Experimental Verification

Additionally, I found a way to verify this — there is another site called “Fuel the Fire” that posted an essay South Africa – Running Diary – Part I that directly linked to an image I had of the loch ness monster that I posted on my old Encyclopedia Uselessia article for The Loch Ness Monster. If it turns out that I have a high search result for the “Loch Ness Monster”, then it means this theory may have merit.

And guess what? Look at the Google Image result for “Loch Ness Monster“:

It seems I was right. If someone provides a link to your image on their site, it has just the same Google-related potency for getting your image featured than if someone provided a link to your essay. And for the most part, the image with the most links wins.

Well, at least this was revealing. And I will make sure to prize the first term search result of my lovely velociraptor for as long as it lasts. More Google Images result updates as events warrant, like always. …Unless it oscillates away for some unexplained reason.

The threat is real.

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