I think Google is reindexing their image search again. I’ve got 300% of the traffic that I should get today and the extra is all attributible to them. Lots of new images are getting ranked high. All are hosted by Hello Picasa. It might just be international right now. I’ll report back later.
Update: Google has reindexed their images pages. And this photo is now on the 2nd page of over 3.8 million images for the search term “love.” Hence all the traffic to it. The question that I have though is still why? Why am I so lucky to have one of my images show up on the 2nd page of search results for such a popular word. This shot is also appearing on the second page search results for “love.” I’m convinced that in part it has to do with the fact that I upload my photos with Hello Picasa. It could also have something to do with the fact that I have a decent Google Page Rank and use blogger to publish. However, I do have to believe that there are other blogs that use the word love with much higher page ranks than mine.
I also, by the way, now have a photo on the number four page out of over 4.1 million images of “sex” and I also now have the number one result for the term “tulips” on Google out of over 245,000 results.
Since Google can be as much as six months behind in indexing photos (notice that these new highly ranked photos of mine were uploaded months ago) it will be interesting to see how much my traffic drops off when Google catches up with the fact that I’ve stopped uploading my photos with Hello Picasa and have started now using Flickr to upload them. And if indeed uploading with Picasa strongly impacts your Google Image Rank, then doesn’t this kind of put a pretty strong bias towards using this Google Property instead of other competing services like Flickr?
This Google Images algorhthim is indeed a mystery to me. I’m not complaining about having my images show up so prominently. It’s kind of nice actually. But overall I don’t think Google’s alogorithm does a very good job of showing me the best images for a given search term. Certainly nowhere near as good as Flickr is doing right now with their interestingness ranking. Flickr, in my opinion, at present has the best image search ranking — but theirs of course is based on actual human input (favs, notes, tags, comments, etc.) and not just technology which is why this is the case.
Still I can’t help but wonder what’s in Google’s secret sauce for image search.