Google Images removes View Image button and direct image URLs AI-researched
Dependency: Google Image Search direct image links
Google removed the 'View Image' button and 'Search by Image' from Image Search results after a settlement with Getty Images — breaking art projects that depended on direct image URLs from search results and causing a 63% drop in image search referrals.
Affected Artworks
Dina Kelberman
Depends on Google Image Search result ecology. Changes to how results are displayed and linked alter the material basis of the curation process.
Steven Read
Uses Google API for real-time image search. Already broken by the 2014 API shutdown; the 2018 changes made workaround scraping approaches harder.
Beat Brogle & Philippe Zimmermann
Builds films from image search results. The live image pipeline was already degraded; removal of direct image links compounds the problem.
justin kemp
Responds to 'no results' Google image searches. Changes to search UI and behavior affect whether the triggering condition occurs.
Fixes & Mitigations
- No fix available: No official replacement for direct image URLs in search results. The change was driven by a legal settlement with Getty Images and is unlikely to be reversed.
On February 15, 2018, Google removed both the “View Image” button and the “Search by Image” button from Google Image Search results. This was the result of a settlement with Getty Images, which had filed a competition complaint alleging Google’s image search facilitated piracy.
What changed
Users could no longer directly access full-resolution image URLs from search results — they were forced to visit the hosting webpage instead. Google also introduced complex double-URL-encoding of image source URLs in the page source, making even scraping-based workarounds unreliable.
Analysis of 87 domains showed a 63% decrease in image search referrals after the change, with some publishers seeing declines of nearly 80%. For art projects that treated Google Image Search as a live data source or creative medium, this was a second wave of breakage after the 2014 API shutdown (already documented as a separate event).
Notes
This event is distinct from the Google Search API discontinuation (2011–2014). That killed programmatic access; this killed the visual/interactive relationship between search results and source images that several net artworks depended on as creative material.