Looking back, it's hard to remember a time when search engines weren't completely commonplace. Nowadays, most people have access to a smartphone and an internet connection almost all of the time. If you're stumped by a bit of trivia, lost in the city, or you've forgotten the name of that actor, then you're never more than a couple of taps from knowing the answer. But of all the search engines out there, Google is perhaps the most well-known and the most powerful. The multi-billion dollar corporation reigns supreme over Silicon Valley and seems almost omnipotent on the internet. It's become so closely associated with search engines that the term "google it" has even fallen into our vocabulary.
However, you might have noticed that lately something has been ever so slightly... wrong with the image search. Maybe, like me, you've been distinctly irritated by the tiny change to the way the site works, since that niggling little detail makes life a little bit more frustrating. It's such a minor change, and yet so important, that you'd be forgiven for questioning your own memory, or for pondering why it's now so difficult. Well, allow me to put you out of your misery and assure you that something has actually changed. Google Images has indeed removed the "view image" button, and what's more, they've kept pretty quiet about it too.
Yes, now when you Google search for an image and click on the one you want, you can no longer look at the image itself by directly hitting "view image." Instead you only have the following options: "visit", "save", "view saved" and "share." This means that, if you want to see the image yourself, you're going to have to visit the site and trawl through the page its hosted on looking for it, which certainly isn't my idea of a good time. Why the sudden change? The reason is because the copyright holders of the images that are being searched are pretty miffed that people have brazenly elected to view the images they have the rights to without viewing the site itself.
Stock image provider Getty Images was the largest of the various copyright holders who were losing out because of this feature and last month they decided to sue Google after lodging gripes with regulators in both the US and Europe. Specifically, Getty Images complained that, because the pictures shown in the Google search results have, since 2013, been offered in high-res formats and not thumbnails, this means that the pictures can be too easily saved and ripped off without any attribution or royalty payments. Thus, Google elected to acquiesce to the demands of Getty Images, and now the "view image" feature is kaput. You won't find it on Google anymore.
In their suit against Google, Getty's general counsel Yoko Miyashita stated: "Because image consumption is immediate, unlike other mediums searchable through Google, such as news or music, once an image is displayed in high-resolution, large format, there is little impetus to view the image on the original source site ... By creating its own captive, image-rich environment and cutting off user traffic to competing websites – and reserving that traffic exclusively for its own benefit – Google is able to maintain and reinforce its dominance in search. It does this without contributing to the costs of creating the content that Google displays and relies upon to attract and maintain users."
Commenting on the change, Google's public liaison of search Danny Sullivan stated: "For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week ... They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value." In a separate statement, Getty Images CEO Dawn Airey claimed: "This agreement between Getty Images and Google sets the stage for a very productive, collaborative relationship between our companies ... We will license our market leading content to Google, working closely with them to improve attribution of our contributors’ work and thereby growing the ecosystem."
This isn't the first time that Getty has taken legal action against a tech giant either. Back in 2015, they also filed a suit against Microsoft due to an image embedding tool which made it possible to place images owned by third parties on any webpage. Then, Microsoft removed the embedding tool and struck a new deal with Getty to give more power to license-holders.
It's pretty annoying that the "view image" feature has been removed, but it is also important that people don't have their content stolen, and it seems that Getty Images was losing a significant amount of profit. The good news is that you can still view images the old way, but you'll have to right click on the thumbnail and open it in a new tab instead. So there you have it: it's not the end of the world after all.