Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi everyone. Last week on Google Image Search, we introduced the ability for users to filter their results down to
images that are just available under particular licenses such as Creative Commons, the GNU Free Documentation License,
and even some public domain images as well. So, as a webmaster, you might be asking yourself the question: "Well, I
have images, and how exactly do I go about staging them so that Google Image Search can parse it all apart and figure
out that a particular image is covered under a particular license?"
And it's a very good question. The simplest way to do this, and I'm going to introduce today, is by using RDFa. And
RDFa is a way of marking up existing HTML elements with particular semantic metadata. So, here we see the image source
tag as you might use it on your page today. The next stage here is to add on an anchor to the particular license that
you happen to be using, such as the one shown here. The final stage in order to stage this image would be to try and
encapsulate this, because the problem we have as a search engine with the markup as you see it right here, is that we
don't really know that license is necessarily talking about the image on the page, or another image on the page, or
even just the text on the page. So the way to do this is to introduce something like a element, and use about=
and then the image that you happen to be talking about, to group these two things together.
So now we have:
Here's a group.
The group is talking about the image.
Here's the image.
And here's the license in question.
And hopefully that should be enough for Google Image Search to figure out what's going on, and how you want this image
to be staged, and how you want this image to be reused. And the other thing to add here of course is that if you do
have particular requirements in terms of attribution, you should make that clear on the page, or have a link off to
another page on your site that says, "Here's how I want to be attributed if you want to reuse my image." It's as
simple as that. We're very excited about this new launch. We really look forward to hearing your feedback, by all
means drop us some messages in the forum. Thank you.