Blogger Image Thumbnails In Google A Bug?

Dec 29, 2008 at 8:35am ET by Barry Schwartz

Steve Rubel reported seeing an excess of what he calls “Blog Thumbnails” in the Google search results. In short, when you do certain searches, Google may show little thumbnail alongside the first set of results. For Steve, this has been happening for “blogger’s name and some other related keywords.” Personally, I have been seeing these types of thumbnails for a while, but they only have come up for me for very specific searches, so I assumed it was a smaller bug then it really was.

Google’s Matt Cutts has commented claiming this is some sort of bug and he has reported it to the right people. Matt said he hopes to “get it straightened out in short order.”

You can currently see the thumbnails for searches for Gigaom papers and Luis Suarez and many others. The ones I have been seeing are related to very specific site command searches for flavors of site:seroundtable.com buzz, which returns this icon:

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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ONE COMMENT ON Blogger Image Thumbnails In Google A Bug?

dazzlindonna, December 29th, 2008 at 9:53 am ET:

When I read the article I was under the impression that Matt’s comment was specific to someone saying that the picture that was shown for the commenter’s name was wrong. So my impression was that getting the wrong photo to display was the bug and not the entire issue of display pics.

Also, when I did a little investigating (about 2 minutes worth), it appeared to be somehow related to videos, based on the pic url, but I’m not sure what the connection is.

p.s. i’ve gone through at least a dozen of the recaptcha refreshes used in this commenting system to find one i could read. /sigh

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