Now when you search on Bing Image Search and click on an image, you will get a beautiful large display of the image and even be able to click to make it full screen. Here is a screen shot:
Bing announced this yesterday saying this makes for a better user experience. It gives you a full size image, faster loading time, easier navigation from one image to the next, and shows you size previews on the screen.
Now although it might make for a better searcher experience, webmasters are not happy.
They feel like Bing is taking their images, using their bandwidth and they are not even getting a pageview from it. A user can just look at the full image on Bing and the site itself gets no pageview from it.
A big time image search expert at WebmasterWorld calls for webmasters to block Bing from crawling and indexing their images. He explained why:
One thing is sure if you care about your images you would block all SEs like you, thats for sure. How Bing now "steel" you images is just ridiculous, they know they take a lot of visits/income from webmaster sites, but I thought we would see such a move from google first.
This is not the first time Bing upset image owners, they did so in April 2011.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.