Steemit Search Results Gone Awry!
This is a bit creepy, bizarre, odd - I'm not really sure what to call it. But, I would like to know why a different photo is appearing along with my last post in Steemit's search results. A photo I have NEVER uploaded to ANY of my Steemit posts. It IS a photo of my artwork, though. Not sure if Google is pulling it directly from my computer, or perhaps from my Facebook account? I didn't think Steemit was linked to FB at all. And, I'm wondering - why this particular image? And, are more of my images getting pulled and added to search results for other posts of mine?
To clarify:
I uploaded a post with artwork & a poem about roses earlier today. I later noticed a couple other posts/photos about roses in my Steemit feed. I thought it was cool to see/view these other rose posts, so I decided to do a search on Steemit for "rose" to see if I could find some more... Feeling certain there probably were some I'd missed, since Valentine's Day just happened this week and there's the "flower" photo contest going on...
I clicked the magnifying glass (search icon) at the top of Steemit...
That brings up Steemit's Search tool (which uses Google Search)...
I typed in the word "rose"...
I changed the search result parameters to "Date" instead of "Relevance"...
Didn't see much...
Then I wondered where was MY post? Hmmm...
I went to the 2nd page of search results, and there was my post half-way down, but that's odd...! A different photo is with it - one of my images of another of my paintings. Only - I have NEVER downloaded this photo to Steemit - in any post - ever!!! I have never even uploaded to Img Safe - the image hosting site I use for Steemit. I have only ever used it on FB, my other blog on Wordpress (as part of my gallery of my artwork), and of course, the image is located in a file on my laptop...
The image is of my watercolor I did years ago - of Hendry's Beach.
So - where did Steemit/Google pull this photo from? Why did they display it with my Rose post? Why DIDN'T they display the image of my rose? And, why? And will it happen again? How do I protect this from happening?
When you click on the post from the Search results, it takes you to my post about roses, and no that image is not in my post - it never was.
What's going on? does anyone have any ideas??? This is strange, right?
Interesting... but I have no idea...
I'm not sure that anyone will know, unfortunately... Thanks.
That's interesting!
I just used the Google powered Steemit search to search for roses, and it shows your post with your Pyrowings logo rather than the magnifying glass image which is showing in my feed, and which is the first image in this post, and what steemit uses in the steemit post lists.
When you drop a link to a steemit post into Facebook or Twitter, they each know where to find the picture to put next to the post, because Steemit tells them in meta data stored in the HTML head tag, which you can see if you "view page source" for any steemit post. Twitter uses twitter meta data, and for images is expects something like
meta name="twitter:image" content="https://i.imgsafe.org/a8080ea2cf.png"where as Facebook uses open graph like
meta property="og:image" content="https://i.imgsafe.org/a8080ea2cf.png"I'm not sure what Google is using to pick an image! I do know they cache the image on their server, so whatever they pick is likely to stick for awhile until they crawl steemit again.
Maybe the Google algorithm for picking an image returned nothing, since it may have crawled the post at the exact second it was posted and Steemit had not yet cached the images, which is something they do, at steemitimages.com. So Google found you as the author in other HTML tags in your post, and looked to see what other images they had for stored for you, and picked one of them. I doubt very much they accessed your computer in any way to grab the image from there.
Steemit just used the Google Search widget because that's an easy way to implement a search on a public website that Google will be crawling and indexing anyway. Eventually Steemit will implement their own search, probably allowing various ways to search, making it more flexible than the Google search, and that will get the image correct I am sure!
I don't think there is anything else you can do to prevent this glitch in the future. But I do expect a new Search from Steemit themselves and they will know to pick the first image in the post for the image in their lists.
Well you asked if anyone had any ideas, and I have had experience with getting images from posts and with using the Google Search widget and with coding my own custom search apps for social networks, so I thought I'd offer my ideas, which are just my opinion.
Beautiful Red Rose, by the way! I up voted it when I saw it earlier in the day. :-)
OK! Thank you! That sort of makes sense. But, I'm still wondering why they chose that beach painting image, since I haven't done anything with it for months if not years. but, thanks. And, glad to hear my other image is now showing.
Hmm... Yeah - now this post shows in the results with my wings logo, and my rose post is on the 3rd page with just the Steemit logo next to it. Interesting.