Sunday, February 10, 2013

Blind Ants Outsmarting the Elephant


It's been an interesting week or so in the land of making a living on the wild, wild web.


At first I thought I would just mention this casually in passing to explain my absence from the land of blog in recent days, but then I decided that perhaps it would be good to show the world some of the realities of this unconventional life I lead.


As I've mentioned before, I make most of my living through ads on various websites that I own and maintain. Most of my sites are graphically oriented - they provide photographs and tools for graphic artists, scrapbookers etc.

Well.... a little over a week or so I noticed a precipitous drop in the number of visitors to my sites. Perplexed and concerned, I did a bit of hunting and discovered that a recent change to the way Google handles searches for images was responsible.


Basically, Google has changed their image search so that it now serves up full sized images directly from websites, without ever sending the searcher to the site where those images are hosted. Granted, there were ways for the user to do the same thing in Google's old image search, but it required a somewhat savvy user, and there were easy ways for the website owner to insure that a visitor had to actually come to their site to get the images.


But their new search bypasses all that, so essentially people are now able to have access to all of my images without ever coming to my site - which means that they never see the advertisements, and I don't make any money from those users.


And to add insult to injury, Google is serving up a direct connection to the images, or "hotlinking" as the industry lingo goes. Without getting too technical, this basically means that even though my site never gets the visitor, I still have to pay for the transfer of data.


Sooo.... UG.


My first reaction to all of this was to pretty much dissolve into a lump of "it's not fair" self pity, punctuated by fits of "it ought to be illegal" rage. And a quick gander at a few webmaster forums told me that I was most definitely not alone in these sentiments.


In fact, owners of graphic-based websites all over the world are basically in a state of panic. Comparatively speaking, I'm in a pretty good position. There are lots of folks who haven't taken the same "keep overhead costs to an absolute minimum" approach that I have, who are facing the very real possibility of having to let go of staff and/or close up shop completely.


So, there are people starting petitions and threatening class action lawsuits, and while it's not impossible that these things will have some effect, compared to an elephant like Google, folks like me are really nothing more than tiny ants.
I'm sorta doubtful that the elephant is even cognizant of the fact that it's squashing so many of us, and I'm not at all convinced that pleas for mercy are the way to go.


Meanwhile, while most of us ants were busy howling and wailing, a few larger web sites quietly started to figure out methods for getting around Google's new system, and requiring people to actually visit their sites in order to get their images.


These folks are probably more akin to mice than ants, since they are big enough companies to have actual IT departments and the resources to find a technical solution. So now, in and among the sound and fury of threats, pleas & petitions, the ants are starting to try to figure out how the mice are doing it.


It's somewhat comical to be sure, since folks who own small graphically based websites tend to be a rather non-technical crowd, but like the blind men and the elephant, we ants are starting to grasp pieces of the puzzle, and bits of the solution are starting to emerge.


I mean if the mice are finding a way to stand up to Google, it MUST be possible!


Soooo... that's basically where I am. I feel a tad bit as though I've been tossed into the dungeon, and am trying to navigate the dark twisting passages of php, mod rewrite, and the Wordpress API.


But I'm not alone down there, and I'm very close to having a solution which, while not quite as robust and elegant as the one employed by the mice, is probably going to be sufficient for my needs. And along the way I'm learning a whole pile of new skills that are giving me even more ideas for ways to make money on the wild, wild web.


So while the road my be a bit bumpy right now, it's all good!





20 comments :

  1. I could be wrong but it seems The Daily Show staff came up with "Scroogled". Seems appropriate in this case.

    With everything that you've accomplished so far, I have complete faith & trust that you will find a way to outwit the Google Overlords. Besides you're a woman & can therefore work wonders.

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    1. Scroogled... I LOVE it!

      We'll see how I fair against the overlords. Google is such a mixed blessing. On the one hand their ad platform makes it really easy for me to make a living on the web. But on the other hand, they really do have the power to make or break people with the bat of an eye. I guess as the old saying goes... Google giveth and Google taketh away!

      But buried inside of each little disaster like this lies opportunity. So I guess I'll just keep working to uncover it!

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  2. It's a cut throat business out there and Google and others will do what they can get away with. I think you may be right about the fact that the elephant may not know that it is squishing ants since they are going after the likes of Microsoft. I hope the solution that you are coming up with works. Good luck.

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    1. You hit the nail on the head. I think that in reality this change was a response to recent changes that both Bing and Yahoo made to their image searches, because it's almost a carbon copy of the Bing system. Funny thing is that when Bing and Yahoo did it nobody noticed. Guess that tells you a bit about how much market share each one has! Can anyone say MONOPOLY?

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    2. Yes, I think you can use Google and monopoly in the same sentence. However, Google and it's services work better for me than Yahoo or Bing.

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    3. Agreed... it's a double edged sword to be sure!

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  3. Good luck finding a solution. I'll just bet you'll get it worked out and do just fine. Love the kitten with the Goldens!

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    1. Me too... hard to go wrong with kittens and goldens!

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  4. Hi, this is Frances from England. I really, really hope you get this one sorted out. I am sure you will, you sound as though you have lots of gumption (good old English word!). Very good luck to you. Personally, I dont like Google - too much power and I dont like their tracking systems.

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    1. "too much power" that's kinda been a theme for me recently. I'm having trouble with my phone/DSL company, so I tried to switch to cable, but that didn't go well either. Oy! Sorta seems like these big companies have so much power that they really don't have to care about their customers because their customers really have no choice but to use them. Sigh.

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  5. It's always a struggle to stay one step ahead of the bigger guys/elephants and when it comes to our livelihood it's mandatory we get to squish the elephant down to size. Good luck to you. Btw, love the reference to the Princess Bride.

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    1. Well... I don't know if we're gonna succeed in squishing the elephant, but when I was looking for pictures for this post, I already found that a HUGE number of sites have implemented "hotlink protection" schemes to safeguard their bandwidth. It's gonna be interesting!

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  6. As a user of Google images, I don't think I'm typical - I liked their old system better. It made me go to the sites, where I could see the photo in context, find out the rights available, and see if other sizes were offered.

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    1. There have been a lot of users complaining too... I think it depends on what kind of user you are. The folks who are graphic designers and photo editors who are actually concerned about things like image licenses seem to agree that this change makes their lives more difficult. Folks who just want to see & grab pictures seem to like it though.

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  7. I really disliked this new google images system, but hadn't considered yet how it would affect webmasters. It's a good thing you have savings. Like any other business, working on the internets has its risks.
    I've seen some sites putting a low-res preview on the image search. It's not a perfect solution, as I don't know if all users will consider checking the original if the preview looks a bit crappy. What's the solution you came up with? As a fellow programmer, I'm interested :)

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    1. Hey Bele,

      Well... basically if you employ any sort of hotlink protection scheme (ie blocking image requests from referrers other than your own site in the .htaccess file) then Google won't be able to bring up the full sized image from your server in that gray panel, and users will just see a blown up version of the thumbnail that Google has saved on its own server.

      So that's half of the scheme... but if you just block the image (ie return a [F] failure code) then the user will get sent to a 403 (forbidden) error page if they click on the "view original image" button. You can customize that page to make it more friendly, but a better solution is to redirect to a php file that looks up the specific page on the site where the image came from and send a header (location) redirect so that when the user clicks on that button they get sent to the page where the image originally appeared.

      Soooo... my photo site uses Wordpress, and I had a functioning php file that looked up the permalink in the Wordpress database and sent the redirect to that page, but unfortunately there were just too many requests and it slowed the server down to a crawl. So I'm working on a simpler system storing the permalink in a simple file so that the php code can get the information without having to load wordpress and query the database. Just need a few more days to get it fully working.

      BUT, the ultimate solution is one where you would redirect hotlinked requests to a watermarked version of your image if the request is embedded in a page, but redirect to the appropriate page on your site if the request is in a stand alone browser window/tab. There's a site called fansshare.com that has it figured out. I can figure out how to redirect to a watermarked version of the image, but I can't figure out how to sort out which requests are for embedded images vs. direct requests (opening the image directly in a separate window/tab) so I can tell when to return a different image and when to redirect to my site.

      OK... that may have been more answer than you were looking for, but that's the conundrum I'm currently grappling with. Know any mod rewrite gurus who might have the answer? :-)

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    2. Hey Cat, it's been a while :) Did you manage to implement the file solution you came up with? I've read some forum threads on the subject when you posted this, and there were issues even with the fansshare.com solution (if you block the referrer header, which many privacy browser extensions do now, you get the watermarked images all over their site -- not pretty). I'm glad you're being able to stay positive through this, some people posting on forums were really freaking out!
      My webmaster friends have not came up with solutions yet, and they don't get much of their traffic through google images, so I can only wish you good luck :B I'm sure you'll get a solution that works for you!

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    3. Hey Bele,

      Looks like Simon over at Pixabay has the Fansshare system figured out:

      http://pixabay.com/en/blog/posts/hotlinking-protection-and-watermarking-for-google-32/

      I'm having a little trouble translating from NGINX/Python to Apache, plus his solution might be interpreted as cloaking by Google, which would get you de-listed completely from their search... so I have to decide if it's worth it or not.

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  8. Being completely computer illiterate all I can say is Wow and look blank. Im glad to hear you have found a way around it as I love to read your stuff and hear about sputnick which means I still get to do this now hey? xx (( ))

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    1. Yes, well... computer programming is basically like learning a foreign language - and I still have to resist the urge to panic when I'm faced with a bunch of unintelligible gobbledygook!

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