This site hates Google so much.

2 min read

Deviation Actions

stevethepocket's avatar
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Has anyone else noticed that any art posted on this site is basically ungoogleable? Seriously, you download any picture from here and plug it into Google's reverse image search dealie and you'll probably get a bunch of DeviantArt results, mostly More Like This pages, but never, ever the source. And I think I figured out why.

See, somewhere along the line, some brain genius decided to rewrite the entire site so that submission pages are generated entirely using AJAX. Why? I'm sure there's some weird technical rationalization like it shaves off 2% off the server load or something. But what it does is ensure that you're never actually visiting username.deviantart.com/art/Insert-Title-Here-1234567; you're visiting the artist's homepage. If it even is the artist, and not some other user entirely who you happened to click on "related images" from about seven pages ago, because the JavaScript hack they use to fake-rewrite the URL bar's contents doesn't even work correctly half the time (and don't even get me started on ever trying to use the Back button with this site).

While this can cause frustration aplenty for us humans, it must wreak utter havoc with Web crawlers trying to access the site. They can't actually read the submission page because from their perspective, there isn't one. That means any text associated with the image — comments, description, even the title — doesn't get indexed. So if someone happened to remember the title of a picture and tried to do an image search, what they'd get 90% of the time isn't DeviantArt, but some repost on iFunny or whatever Cheezburger site has popped up to milk the fandom du jour. Sites whose entire business model is stolen content and which, legally, shouldn't even be allowed to exist. They don't even have to resort to sleazy search-engine manipulation tactics; DeviantArt is losing to them by forfeit.

Anyway, I don't usually resort to this, but if you too are angry about this, favorite this journal and link to it in your own to spread the word, because maybe, maybe, there's still someone on the technical staff who has a clue what they're doing and legitimately doesn't know about this problem, and maybe if we wish really really hard, they'll come across this journal and do something about it.
© 2016 - 2024 stevethepocket
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AgnosticDragon's avatar
I have long noticed that TinEye is a mess, but I did not know the reason.