I really don’t get it. I’ve conducted many Google searches, especially image searches, on a wide variety of topics, and Google generally does a pretty good job of providing relevant content on the first page or so, but as you get farther down in the listings you get all sorts of content that is totally unrelated to your search. Search for an image of a UFO and you might might images of guns, ostriches, cars, naked women (well lots of naked men and women, porn sites spam a lot apparently) and so forth. Why do they DO that? Do they imagine people will go, “I was looking for an image of a UFO but here’s a random naked woman!”
Does there exist a large population of people feeble minded enough to be distracted in that way? If I wanted to look at guns or naked women I’ll do a search for them! Not UFOs! How can this practice be anything but a waste of bandwidth in terms of attracting people actually interested in your content?
Or are they maybe trying to fool advertisers about the popularity of their website by getting tons of hits using popular keywords? What’s going on? I only have theories, some knowledge would be nice.
Many webmasters are simply obsessed with driving traffic to their site, usually because they want more customers, or just because more traffic generates more page impressions and thus hopefully more revenue from the ads on their pages. In order to bring this about, they aggressively try to promote their search engine rankings, but because they’re gaming the system, it affects the integrity of the search engine results - they end up increasing irrelevant search hits, as well as capturing more of the interested traffic.
You’re right, it was a different search, for a playboy Playmate by name, but I still go the ostriches and guns and a lot of other very unrelated stuff, including hardcore, but no wonder the naked women, I guess. As for the naked men … maybe gay pornsite guys think of Republicans dutifully scanning for straight porn and then getting gay stuff and going “… Hellooooooo… this seems intriguing.”
Most of what you’re running into probably isn’t the result of “spamming” but, since you’re talking about image search, is likely just part of the reality of what that is.
Images themselves can’t be algorithmically evaluated and indexed by search engines. An “image search” isn’t a lot different than a normal text search: the results are based on based on text on the page that contains the image and that of pages that link to that one, along with other data like the image filename.
So if there are pages containing pictures of your Playboy playmate that also talk about guns, ostriches, or cars, they’re going to bleed into your search results. As you’ve noticed, the first page or two of results can be pretty much relevant, but after that the text-based algorithms end up really reaching. Unlike normal results on text-based pages, there’s just not a lot of data to base the decision on. Think about how often a page that houses an image is just that – a page with the necessary “<img>” tag pointing to the pic file, but no text of any kind to put it into context.
Junk in the image search feature is most likely a side effect. They are spamming the regular text search engine. But image search relies on that somewhat, so irrelevant images start showing up in image searches because the regular search results have been manipulated.
Spammers usually have their fingers in several pies. One, they’re running ads on their sites. Two, they’re selling something directly - weight loss pills, ponzi scam, whatever. And three, they’re selling something to other spammers - traffic arbitrage, proxies, links.
All of those things pay proportional to traffic. The more times you show up in search results, the more traffic you get. QED.
Searching for the unique username that always pulls up something about me in text search, will still seem to get random pictures. I’m pretty sure no one is spamming my name. For one thing, it has no vowels.