No Keywords for Google Image Search

[Liz Y]

My site was recently picked up by Google Images, and since I have lots of images, I'm getting lots of hits originating there; no keywords, though, and I'm very curious as to exactly what's being searched for.

The referral links themselves don't help me either, because unlike regular Google search links, they're long, rambling and incomplete. Can these keywords be captured, or is it technically impossible?

Thank You

[robinev]

If that's a bug, it is a Google bug that can't be solved by StatCounter.

Google doesn't maintain the search terms in the referral string that they use. It would be possible for them to do it. A9, a search engine that uses Google's indexes and allows for searches in the Google image index, does maintain the search terms in the referral when a user selects an item from the larger list of thumbnails.

Unfortunately, very few folks use A9.

SC does, however, truncate the Google (and A9) referral, which makes them even less useful. But even without the truncation, Google's referral isn't going to tell us what terms the user entered to find the image.

BTW: You've probably figured it out, but just in case: The Google referral string shows the url of the image file ("imgurl=") and then shows the url of the page on which that image was found ("imgrefurl="). Of course, because they update their image indexes infrequently, there is no guarantee that the image will still be displayed on the page listed.

As to how people might be finding the images, that might be an interesting topic for the lounge. In fact, I've started a topic on the subject (http://forum.statcounter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4248) just in case you or others have looked into it.

[Liz Y]

If that's a bug, it is a Google bug that can't be solved by StatCounter.
Thank you, robinev! :)
I wasn't sure where to put this question, and wasn't sure it was a real bug, anyway. At least I know now that it's normal and not just me.

And thanks for the explanation on those weird partial urls, too. They were making me a wee bit more paranoid than I already am.
I did some searching for my own images, though, so I did get to see what they look like to a searcher.

I'll go peek at your topic thread in a little while...

[oolong]

Is this really something at Google's end? It seems to me that the search terms are present, albeit not obvious in the full URL. For instance, an image search on Oolong gives me this (insanely long) referring URL (http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://fergusmurray.members.beeb.net/pouring.jpg&imgrefurl=http://fergusmurray.members.beeb.net/oolong.htm&h=345&w=300&sz=13&tbnid=_4LKXle53XsJ:&tbnh=115&tbnw=100&hl=en&start=14&prev=/images%3Fq%3Doolong%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26client%3Df irefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG), which seems to break down like this:
http://images.google.co.uk/ - obviously
imgres?imgurl=http://fergusmurray.members.beeb.net/pouring.jpg - the image being linked to
&imgrefurl=http://fergusmurray.members.beeb.net/oolong.htm - the page where it appears
&h=345&w=300&sz=13&tbnid=_4LKXle53XsJ:&tbnh=115&tbnw=100&hl=en&start=14 the height, width and size in k of the image - not sure what the rest of it is
&prev=/images%3Fq%3Doolong%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26 - this is the bit that seems to have the search term in it
client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG - this bit tells it about my client.

Sure enough, adding 'pouring' to the search adds 'pouring' to that line of the referring URL.

*wonders whether to take this to the 'Feature Request' section*

- Oolong (http://oolong.co.uk)

[robinev]

Ah! Very good. You found it!

The search term does, indeed, seem to be in there within the "prev" parameter and following "q=".

So yes. Since Google is including the information, it would be most worthwhile to add a feature request for StatCounter to collect enough of the referrer string to be able to get this string out of there, and then to include it within the Keyword analysis.