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Picasa Finally Searchable with Google!

And I say again. Finally!

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

16th of November 2007, 16:05 GMT

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Google said yesterday that it is not responsible for the content it hosts for its users and that everyone should be held responsible for his actions. A normal point of view, the only thing not so normal is that it did not allow some of the content users have uploaded to be searchable.

It looks like it's all being taken care of at the

moment, Picasa photos can now be found in the normal Google Images Search manner.

Ionut Alex Chitu says that "I've always wondered why Google prevents search engines to index a lot of user-generated content from its properties (photos uploaded to Blogger and Picasa Web Albums, public documents from Google Docs). It's a strange decision from a company whose goal is to make information widely available. For example, no photo uploaded to this blog can be found in Google Image Search or in other image search engines because a robots.txt file disallows that.

Some reasons could be more technical: Picasa Web uses a lot of AJAX and loads images using JavaScript, so search engines can't crawl its pages, but that doesn't mean Google can't come up with a interface that uses less JavaScript."

The interesting observation is that there's been no change in Picasa Web's robots.txt file, so Google must be doing the same thing that Yahoo is doing, that is mixing the results from Picasa Web with the standard results, in a hopefully balanced manner. Translation: you'll only be able to search for them via the Google search engine. Momentarily only the Picasa Web albums HTML is excluded from bots but not the actual image storage servers.

"It's interesting to see that Google requires to login to Picasa Web Albums, even if you are already logged in your Google Account and the photo that you're searching for is from a public album," Ionut Alex Chitu concludes.

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