I have what I believe is an easy (& quick) question for the tech folk at CoinTalk. How do all the different photos find their way to pages like Bing images & Google images? I have found several of my coin photos on these places & I believe that those photos were only posted at CoinTalk. I’m just curious how it happens & what the Internet mechanism(s) may be.
Search engines use things called spiders to search websites for new data. They look for revelant websites to help people with searches. The more a site changes or new data is added the juicier it looks to these websites as it will most likely provide the best chance of finding current relevant information. I'm sure there is something similar for internet images. CT is a pretty juicy target for the search engine spiders. I see threads I have started and images I have posted on CT all the time while google searching.
A combination of google search worms crawling the web looking for images and cookies that report what you looked at to third parties would be my best guess.
Yep & they could read the EXIF data on that gold coin photo & send someone to collect it at the GPS coordinates of my home. [Just kidding of course]. I find it fascinating that when someone Googles a particular coin (like "Brazil Leper colony coin" for example) & they are promptly provided photos depicting every Brazil Leprosy colony coin in my collection. Way cool.
Threads that mention specific coins are automatically harvested and any images that appear in those threads are categorized under the search term used.
The first things the crawlers look for are the actual image file names, and then the "alt" property for an image tag.
