
Ask HN: Is Someone Hijacking Google Images? - squarefoot
I was looking for ideas on how to build a simple network analyzer to test antennas, filters etc. so I typed &quot;network analyzer schematic&quot; (without quotes) on Google Images and it apparently returned some results I was expecting, but clicking on a lot of results from the first page opened some subscription only websites with suspicious names nagging me to create an account to see the actual images, some of which I&#x27;m 100% sure I already have seen on their original authors websites.
Those websites are clearly made by the same entity, and to me it appears they&#x27;re essentially hijacking Google Images results for their profit.
Here are some of those results; many more on the 1st page. I had a hard time finding something that returned an actual loadable image or an article without asking for subscription.
Note that they all return URLs containing &quot;spectrum analyzer schematic&quot; although I searched for &quot;network analyzer schematic&quot;.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yyrfm.microdeo.de&#x2F;spectrum_analyser_circuit_diagram.php<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;4.twizer.co&#x2F;rf-spectrum-analyzer-schematic.html<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;5.6.gvapor.nl&#x2F;rf_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;18.10.ulrich-temme.de&#x2F;spectrum_analyzer_schematic_symbols.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;4.3.beckman-vitamin-d.de&#x2F;vcr_tuner_based_rf_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;18.10.ulrich-temme.de&#x2F;spectrum_analyzer_schematic_symbols.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;2.4.wohnungzumieten.de&#x2F;gbppr_1_ghz_spectrum_analyzer_second_local_oscillator_schematic.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;5.6.gvapor.nl&#x2F;rf_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;13.1.starpartybus.com&#x2F;lm3915_spectrum_analyzer_schematic.php<p>Edit: it appears those pages are being slowly buried by legit results, but some of them still surface although much deeper.<p>Examples:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3.17.tierarztpraxis-ruffy.de&#x2F;pna_x_block_diagram.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;10.10.artatec-automobile.de&#x2F;block_diagram_power_antenna_wire.php<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9.20.wohnungzumieten.de&#x2F;logic_probe_with_sound_circuit_schematic.php<p>7.12.gvapor.nl&#x2F;dds_function_generator_mcu_schematic.php<p>Note that I searched for the same exact phrase as above.
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dTal
Isn't this basically what Pinterest is doing? All their images are stolen from
elsewhere on the web (and the website behaves extremely obnoxiously when you
try to actually _view_ an image without an account), and yet Pinterest results
consistently rank higher than the actual primary sources of the stolen images.

~~~
Something1234
Pinterest is the absolute worst. They're basically plargists at this point. I
really don't like rehosters.

~~~
l33tbro
I don't understand how they haven't been penalized.

~~~
Jerry2
They probably have some kind of a deal with Google. Same kind of a deal that
LinkedIn has with Google... you can't view most of the LinkedIn profile pages
that Google indexes without being logged in. If I served a different page to
Google's search bot from pages that everyone else can see, I'd be banned from
Google's index. But these big companies have special rules...

~~~
JonathanMerklin
Currently I'm not near my computer to verify myself (I am on my phone, before
bed), but can you get into walled-but-indexed LinkedIn/Pinterest content with
"Googlebot" UA spoofing?

I'd want to assume that their systems are more advanced than that (or if
they're really in cahoots, maybe Google crawls them with a unique, secret bot
UA to prevent this sort of thing), but I just got done with another thread
where an ex-Tumblr dev said all user content was in a single S3 bucket without
MFA delete so my gut feeling is lending a bit more weight to the "everything
is held together with rubber bands and duct tape and it's only a matter of
time before the jig is up" parameter than the "large, powerful companies tend
to hire smart people that communicate and design robust systems effectively"
one.

~~~
oarsinsync
Based on my experience in the nautical industry, where most things were quite
literally held together using velcro, metaphorical rubber bands and duct tape
seems quite likely for relatively younger web industries.

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kryogen1c
I cant believe this didnt get more traction.

I have been noticing a very painful decline in Google results with more
content not labeled as ads but clearly placed due to a metric other than
usefulness. I routinely find myself multiple pages deep in searches, which
never used to happen.

Mark my words, this is purposeful on googles end, either directly through some
kind of ordering affiliate or indirectly through some kind of seo partnership

~~~
lapnitnelav
FWIW, Google is about to put more ads[0] in the Image search results

[https://www.blog.google/products/ads/shopping-google-
images/](https://www.blog.google/products/ads/shopping-google-images/)

~~~
tyingq
That would align their interests with sites where clicking on the image gives
a register or paywall. Because more users will bounce back to more ads.

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aasasd
I'd say this is just aggressive SEO, with you looking for a specific digital
“product” of schematics. I get similar experience in regular search when
looking for manuals for appliances and such.

As for ‘spectrum analyzer’ instead of ‘network analyzer’, it's probably
Google's wonderful synonym substitution, which considers ‘music’ and ‘noise’
interchangeable, or similarly with ‘Saint Petersburg’ and ‘Moscow.’

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ppetty
Just for comparison I uploaded this image of both duckduckgo & google for the
query above: [https://imgur.com/a/1Fci80P](https://imgur.com/a/1Fci80P)

The layouts are different & it’s hard to tell if that impacts whether or not
the results are sorted by dimension so they can fit the maximum number of
images in the viewport; or if they just have slightly different ranking.

Probably a little of both, but image search results are a little harder to
compare between search engines — or harder to compare than “plain” results.

My point is, while it’s completely fair to question Google’s results and doubt
what actually producing those results; it’s a lot more scientific to compare
their results to at least one of their “competitors.”

Easier said than done, but until there are no comparisons available we should
do this (maybe just to produce data so when you search “Which is better Google
or ??????” there’s a result).

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dayze
I think it must be happening on your end. When I search for the same thing I
get normal images and none of the domains you list above.

~~~
megaremote
How does it happen on his end, when it is a google search?

~~~
eitland
Malware (specifically adware) browser extensions or malware on computer. Edit:
I mentioned malware on ISP, but I guess Google has their TLS in order so the
ISP shouldn't see or be able to mess with the content like they did before.

Not necessarily saying this happened on the user end though, I just outlined
how it could happen.

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sexy_seedbox
You should try going to www.google.com/ncr first and then see if your results
are different.

~~~
copperx
What is that? It redirects me to www.google.com.

~~~
_wmd
"no country redirect", sets a cookie to prevent you getting the google domain
for your locale

~~~
franze
and doesn't work anymore like you think it works

it keeps you on google.com

but you still get your markets search results and your language (thx europes
"right to be forgotten" for the decline of /ncr functionality)

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villgax
Yeah this happens on search as well, whenever you search for something very
specific then the only few pages that show up contain these weird php sites
for >50% of the irrelevant results & are mostly cached versions of the
original site's content.

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hatfieej
I got the same thing here, but had to scroll just a little. It's always the
same popup on each site. It leads to a Czech Republic company herbalfun which
offers downloads of games and movies for $40/mo. It looks like someone may be
buying up recently expired domains, uploading a bunch junk there and Google is
falling for it. Going to just the main site of any of those links shows just a
long link of links for various strings.

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kappuchino
What they do is basic search result manipulation.

I'm genuinely confused why the crawler/analyzer part google doesn't see and
blacklists this (Context:I used to work as a search quality rater for google)

Look at: [http://3.17.tierarztpraxis-
ruffy.de/pna_x_block_diagram.php](http://3.17.tierarztpraxis-
ruffy.de/pna_x_block_diagram.php) Short it to: [http://3.17.tierarztpraxis-
ruffy.de/](http://3.17.tierarztpraxis-ruffy.de/) (Weblink to admin@gmail.com -
haha, funny)

Change it to [http://www.tierarztpraxis-ruffy.de/](http://www.tierarztpraxis-
ruffy.de/) ... same But:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DHZ9Sdt...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DHZ9SdtbSRQJ:www.tierarztpraxis-
ruffy.de/+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de)

and this is just "blacklist and forget" stuff: Show one to the "user" and the
other to the crawler. Maybe Matt should see this.

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kevinventullo
This happened to me the other day when looking for a high resolution image of
a world map with country labels. For the life of me, I could not find one on
Google Image search that led to a directly downloadable file. I finally gave
up and used Bing (!) and got what I was looking for immediately (!!).

~~~
julianlam
Yeah this happened to me too! I was looking for a simple outline drawing of
the USA, with state-level outlines. All I found were pages and pages of sites
letting me buy what I wanted for the low low price of `$morethaniwanttopay`

I don't recall what I did in the end, possibly DuckDuckGo'd it

------
mrhappyunhappy
The same thing is happening with PDFs. Google any popular business or finance
book and append pdf and see the results for yourself. Google has been gamed by
affiliate marketer - my guess it’s the same guy who was outed a while ago and
had his address shared online. It was a HN headline not long ago.

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techaddict009
Surprising many of the above redirect to this :

[https://signup.peltmedia.com/en/html/sf/registration/eone.ht...](https://signup.peltmedia.com/en/html/sf/registration/eone.html)
page

Seems like this is like same old free download click here and when you click
it says subscribe to download.

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agent008t
I am highly suspicious that google was instrumental in centralizing the web.
At some point, it started to increasingly only show results from the same
dozen or two websites. At this point, if you want to search for something that
is not hosted on one of the popular 'centralized' sites, you are out of luck.

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knowsmorsecode
Maybe these are hijacked wordpress sites. Anyway, I'm using this
[https://www.sdr-kits.net/VA5-Antenna-Analyzer-Kit](https://www.sdr-
kits.net/VA5-Antenna-Analyzer-Kit) . It only goes to 600 MHz and is cheap, but
my needs are simple.

------
z3t4
I got none of these. Maybe someone from google saw this and manually cleaned
up the search results.

However, everything after scrolling three pages down are people faces linking
to "Sydex.net People Search"

My guess is "SEO" abuse. Google are always 3 years behind the SEO black hats.

------
titanix2
I noticed something similar recently when searching for icon like files.

~~~
Jaruzel
Right now, Google Images is _useless_ for icon type images. I've had to switch
to using Bing images, which is currently better for smaller, square images
that can be used or modified for icons.

Top tip: although Bing Images doesn't have an 'Exact Size...' option, I've
found that suffixing your query with <X>x<Y> (i.e. '256x256') seems to work.

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k_sze
Could this be an effect of the Google filter bubble? What if you open an
incognito session, disable tracking, and try searching on Google again?

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erik14th
Most of the time you can inspect the element and get the url to the actual
image.

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buboard
i thought google images was for finding pinterest boards and stock photo sites

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Calist0
This is when you open up devtools and remove the pesky obstacles.

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r3nrut
Are you searching through Google.com or a different domain suffix?

~~~
dfsdfklgjljg
seems like mostly german results

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mtnGoat
unfortunately this has been going on with all of google search results since
people figured out their algos could be gamed.

