Stupid technical question

Most of the referrers in my logs lately have been various google image searches for maybe half a dozen images here. Is this a new form of hot linking or what?

9 responses to “Stupid technical question

  1. The exact same thing is happening with me, but it does not appear to be any sort of spamming or hotlinking or any other nefarious activity. I use an .htaccess file to prevent people from hotlinking, and I often see people trying over and over again to download the same image through Google and getting denied, so I know it works.

    I suspect that the Google bots have expanded their seach for images and some things just come up more frequently than others.

  2. D

    Can you elaborate on the htaccess file? I think I’d like to implement that sort of control too. Mig feel free to jump in if this is something you know how to do already.

  3. mig

    No idea about the htaccess file. I would also be interested in learning more about that.

  4. .htaccess is a pretty big topic. you can do almost anything with it! not something learned lightly. your web host likely has an interface to it, and it also likely has an option to disable “bad” hotlinking to your images.

    what i imagine Brian is talking about is a step beyond bad hotlinking, which is the method used by many-a-livejournal user in which they link to an image on your site, but display it on their page. This is considered rude because you are providing bandwidth for their page. I get a ton of this type of usage in my site when I do not have hotlinking disabled. The polite thing to do is to ask for permission to use the image, then to download it to your own server and use it as needed.

    What it sounds like Brian is doing is denying access to the image based on REFERER, meanign that if somebody finds the image in google image search, then clicks on it to download it, he uses .htaccess rules to deny that download. While I see *some* benefit to this if you want to protect your images from being downloaded by people who found them via google image search, far better would be just to deny Google spiders access to your site. I mean, why do you put things on the web if you don’t want them to be found?

  5. Hey Mig!

    I don’t know if you guys have held to the Thanksgiving day traditions over there or not – but have a good one, nevertheless!

  6. A lot of my recent referrers seem to be google image searches from what appears to be a Korean travel website. I can’t figure why, although I had put up half a dozen pictures of Buenos Aires earlier this year.

  7. mig

    Thanks, Ron! Same to you, and everyone else.
    Thanks for the tips, guys.
    I have begun blocking hotlinking, I think, but am still getting the g00gle 1mage s3arches, so they are either innocent or more evil than i thought.

  8. hotlinking hampering does not take your images out of google image search because they don’t do hotlink — i think they actually save a copy of your image.

  9. I’m blocking image hotlinking with a .htaccess files, and still most of my referrers are Google image searches.

    The point is, more and more people are using Google image search, and whenever somebody looks for an image and clicks on it in Google, you see it on your referrer log. There is nothing you can do about it other than not posting images.