Might this be a request by Life Magazine, and not Google's choice??

alex

They're not Google's images to share. Google had to negotiate a deal to just list them. Isn't that obvious?

Mysterius, I don't know, that's why I asked Google, but they didn't tell.

I think it's because LIFE pictures are indexed in another index than usual Google Images. So this prevent to get some images results twice.

More reason for competing search engines to ignore robots.txt alltogether... Some of them already do.

> I think it's because LIFE pictures are indexed in another
> index than usual Google Images. So this prevent to get
> some images results twice.

Though if that were the case, then as solution Google could exclude the Googlebot from those directories, but allow other search engines in... after all the robots.txt format allows different directives for different crawlers...

A side-effect is that none even Google's main search engine indexes the pages from Life's archive. Maybe Google wanted to promote its image search engine and decided to make it the only way to browse/search the collection. Google Image Search promotes the hosted content on the homepage: http://images.google.com/imghp?gl=us .

Another possibility is that Google, being a business rather than a charity, paid money to put the LIFE archive on the Internet, and wants to earn a return on that expenditure, and therefore doesn't want to give its investment away for free to Yahoo and MSN.

Philipp: I suppose Google's reply wasn't as explicit as it could have been, but it immediately suggested to me ("many of its *own* properites" and the bit about purchasing licensing from LIFE) that Google did not feel its license gave them permission to distribute LIFE's pictures.

Andy Baio's comparison is not appropriate, since these photos are clearly not meant by LIFE to be freely distributed, given that Google had to negotiate a deal to even display them.
Google provides the hosting for the images, but I suspect LIFE has ultimate authority over them.

The pictures were touted in the launch release as free to use for personal and non-commercial uses:

http://searchengineland.com/google-to-host-10-million-time-life-unpublished-images-15513

So there's no reason I can see for LIFE to want them blocked from spidering. Copyright infringement? Well, Google's gone to court to argue that spidering images isn't an infringement.

They should drop the block.

I totally agree with Danny. If LIFE demanded that Google block other search engines from crawling the images, they should've renegotiated the contract. Letting images be spidered has nothing to do with copyright.

they'll be indexed when i right click, save as and then re-host them elsewhere on the web!