In other words, the perfect blend of old Google (fast, reliable) and new Google (usable, pretty).

Old Google image search returned a grid of images, which users could click on to see larger, and click again to go to the originating site. New Google image search will show a large image with detailed metadata and and ribbons of other image results:

Google image search, old and new

The good news for webmasters — and, presumably, owners of photographs and other images — is that Google will now be showing image metadata and the name of the website the image is from right on next to the image, with a link to the originating website. Google says there are now “four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two,” which Google says that in user testing has resulted in more traffic to the original hosting websites.

All of which means that Google is showing greater respect for the owners of images, which is good news.

The new image search is not yet live, so I can’t actually test it. One question that occurs is that while it’s clear that the image-by-image experience is likely better, the new image search might make it harder to quickly scan a large number of images to narrow down a search for a particular file.

One other bit of good news for those of us who like to keep our fingers on the keyboard: Google says that image searchers will be able use their keyboards to quickly flip through images.

Zooming in on November and December 2012 it’s not hard to spot when Thanksgiving 2012 happened. Fully 1/5 of the attacks that CloudFlare saw in November and December (so far) happened on the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving:

In the past we’ve seen drops in DDoS attacks on some holidays because the home and office machines used as bots in those attacks have been turned off. For example, this year we noticed a large drop in attack activity on Earth Day (when people are encouraged to switch off their machines to save the planet). But this year’s Thanksgiving attack statistics indicate that plenty of hacked machines were online through the holiday.

But what does this tell us about the coming Christmas holiday period? To answer that we can look back to December 2011. CloudFlare has DDoS data for December 11, 2011 to January 1, 2012 which shows two distinct peaks of attack activity: one just before Christmas and one just after.

So, if 2011 is a guide DDoS attackers will be taking a few days off over Christmas, but will be keeping the pressure on just before and immediately after. That’s probably not a surprise as some fo the attackers will be attempting to disrupt businesses during critical periods for pre- and post-Christmas sales.

Even though there’s a Christmas lull, that doesn’t mean that CloudFlare staff will be letting down their guard, however. We’ll be here working to ensure that whenever attacks arise and from whereever we’re ready to absorb and deflect them.

John Graham-Cumming is the lead programmer at CloudFlare, the content delivery and security network. Prior to CloudFlare he worked at a number of startups and created the award-winning POPFile email machine learning software. He knows way too much about GNU Make having self-published a book entitled GNU Make Unleashed. He joined CloudFlare to take on the task of ‘patching the Internet.’

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

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