You may wonder about this especially if you’ve only found your watermarked images on your own website. You ask yourself if Digimarc is really trying to find your images. No doubt communicating your copyright ownership and authorship is very important to you, but you may be thinking you’re part of the old joke about a person living in Los Angeles who is being pitched an amulet that is suppose to ward off polar bears. When they say there are no polar bears in Los Angeles, the pitchman says, “See how well it works!”

If you are manually searching for your images on the WWW, you know that the sheer size of the internet will require a great deal of luck to find them or very a good idea of exactly who your audience is.

If you’ve purchased a Gallery or Enterprise account that includes the Digimarc Search Service, you might be thinking your reports should have more found images by now. I can assure you it’s not from lack of trying. Currently, the service searches about 250,000,000 images per month. Yes, that number is about 250 MILLION images searched per month, for a total of around 3 BILLION images per year; and, we are working on increasing those numbers as I write this blog.

So, again you are asking “why doesn’t the service find more of my images?:

Since I know you’ve been reading my blogs, your watermarked images have been tested, they’re as robust as possible and set-up so it’s not easy for someone to repost your images. I don’t suppose I could stop here and say that your diligence is why your images haven’t been found since no one would dare download them? OK, I had to ask.

There is the reality that while every image being watermarking can be compelling, not all are downloaded and reposted on the web. But, if your image has been downloaded and reposted, what’s keeping it from being found already?

The sheer size of the World Wide Web versus our 250 million images searched each month.

Wisegeek.com noted in July 2009, “There are thought to be some 155 million websites on the Internet, but this number fluctuates wildly from month to month, and one runs into a problem of what exactly constitutes a website. Is a person’s individual Facebook page its own website? How about their LiveJournal or blog? What if the blog is hosted by a blog service?”

Then there’s this little advertised Google event from 2008 where we find: “Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days – when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!”

Each page within a website has its own URL; so apparently there are a lot of pages on those approximately 155 million websites. The number of images on the web or per webpage is even more speculative. I can’t find any sources that agree with each other or cite an actual reference source, just educated (?) guesses.

The Digimarc Search Service focuses on those areas of the web with the greatest chance of yielding the best results – that is commercially available sites and those directed by our customers. The service is influenced by previous searches, customer requests and other metrics to continually improve the results. The Search Service cannot get into a password protected sites and it doesn’t bother with Uber sites like Amazon or eBay since these could consume a month’s worth of image searches and the images are always changing. Besides, these are relatively easy to check on your own. We have mentioned to some these Uber sites that they could scan the product images very quickly when uploading to confirm their ownership, but they’ve had other priorities. Perhaps you can put a plug in for us.

While I can’t guarantee that your images will be amongst the approximately 3 Billion images we’ll search this year, it is 3 Billion more chances of having your images found and reported to you before you watermarked your images. Plus, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones and your images just haven’t been stolen!  It’s certainly not a bad thing to receive the assurance that your images did not end up on the potentially stolen list that others will need to follow up on.

And, let’s not forget that 3 Billion is probably a conservative estimate since Digimarc fully expects to have an expanded Search Service before the end of this year, along with a few other significant upgrades that will increase the images found (yes, this is a teaser). 

So are 3 Billion or more chances per year to find your images on the WWW worth it?

That amulet in your hand may or may not scare off a polar bear, but the 3 Billion+ attempts per year to find your watermarked images are very real. In fact, the Search Service just scanned about 60 images per minute while you were reading this blog.