We probably wouldn’t care about that either, but they are not only the consumers of tomorrow, but already the consumers of today. The tumbler-wielding youth of today are pretty tired of having to look for hours and hours for that particular funny cat gif (yeah, you know the one, that one) that has something written all over it with none of the desired results. Repeating the experiment for our logo (which contains no embedded text), the search engine did a pretty good job figuring out that the logo is related mainly to “cognitive seo”, probably by drawing conclusions from the text in the vicinity of various image occurrences and compiling a best guess, based on the visually similar images contingent on the order of the pixels in the image. It also supports the idea that although reading image-embedded text may be in the books for Google, it’s not yet at the level of mastery needed to be universally implemented. The adjacent text theory also explains the other misinterpreted image, the one with the “Try it for free” text. Probably because in most places the similar images were hosted, the text surrounding the image talked about 90’s cars.Īdmittedly, the design is fairly reminiscent of that era’s particular brand of ostentatious sport cars. What we can say with certainty is that in a lot of cases and in most of our experiments, Google turned out to be pretty savvy in interpreting images. It would explain why it interpreted the picture of a rear view of a red sports car as “90’s cars” instead of a new Ferrari, which it is. It’s less common knowledge exactly how many words (and keywords) Google makes of an image. It has become a common place to say that an image is worth a thousand words. And I don’t mean that in the classic “an image is worth a thousand words” metaphorical sense, but in that so much of the content and of the way content is structured has to do with the use of images as lines in an imaginary dialogue, with text embedded in those images. But let’s go back to the original question: why should we care about text that is embedded in pictures (other than logos)? The best answer is probably that… that’s just how people talk over the Internet nowadays. Obviously, there’s some interest in this. Other brand-related examples come to mind, mostly in the form of online image advertisements. This is probably why there already is patented a technology that does exactly this. Sure, it’s probably just another iteration of the brand name in many cases, but it’s a relevant reiteration of it. Logos are basically text information, in a lot of cases, but in image form. What’s the case for photo-embedded text? There are several intuitive scenarios that come to mind, out of which the case of logos seems like the most obvious. And as Google is making increasingly significant efforts in the direction of image recognition technology, having recently acquired DeepMind, it’s hard to believe that photo-embedded text is not an area of interest. In this long and (we hope) interesting article we did some interesting experiments in order to understand how Google is approaching the image search matter and to see what the implications for the SEO and digital marketing field are.
At the same time, the question if text embedded in photos “can’t be read by search engines” remains.
#Google photos search by description series#
In fact, the conventional wisdom seems to be that search engines do not take into account photo-embedded text (assuming they can read it at all) and that the practice of embedding text in photos is generally a bad idea for a series of other non-SEO reasons (mostly having to do with accessibility of the information for the user). It is pretty much agreed that Google can and probably does read metadata embedded in photos, though whether that influences SEO in any way is still disputed.
0 kommentar(er)
