Google has changed their image search wording and this has major implications for every furniture retailer, manufacturer and interior designer.

As many of you reading this know, it’s long been possible, via Google’s search engine, for anyone to conduct a reverse image search on any image that anyone has placed on Google.

I have often used Google’s reverse image search feature to find out who an image belongs to, so I can give correct image attribution in the blog posts I write - and I imagine many of you have done the same.

What’s news is this:

it used to be that the drop down menu that would appear on any Google image, would say,

“Search this Image on Google.”

Now, that drop down menu says,

“Search this image with Google Lens. “

What does this mean?

It means that all images you place online, that get indexed by Google, are now part of their LENS feature, and thus are shoppable, as that is the only option Google is giving everyone for searching an image.

What does LENS do?

Let’s take a look.

In this case, I was searching for who handpainted this bottle of champagne that I shared on my personal Facebook profile, as a friend had asked me to find out.

As you can see from what is circled in pink, when I right clicked on the image, it said only, “Search Image With Google Lens”. That was news to me as previously I would have seen, “Search Google For This image.”

When I did search this image using Google LENS, I immediately got back all the visual matches that Google could find. None of them were an exact match, but many showed me several other options for where I might buy or order handpainted champagne bottles.

However, because I was looking for an exact match, I kept scrolling down, and that’s when I found an image that was an exact match, allowing me to locate the woman who handpaints these champagne bottles.

This new verbiage from Google holds true for whatever image you and/or your customers/clients now search.

LENS also [sometimes but not always ] puts white dots on images, themselves. This is not new. It makes those specific products with the white dots on them shoppable, via lookalike - and often much lower quality value engineered - products.

Unfortunately, if you are a consumer reading this post, you don’t always realize that the lookalike products you are considering buying from a retailer, manufacturer or designer’s uploaded image usually has the quality value engineered out of it, to meet the big lifestyle or online retailers’ preferred price points.

What do I mean?

In addition to the big online lifestyle retailers, the big luxury lifestyle brick and mortar/online retailers will often require their vendors to value engineer quality out of products -especially upholstery - so they can meet their profit margins, while still selling as many of that thing to you as possible - based on the price point their historical online purchase data shows them will move the most inventory.

[ Side note: This is one reason why it pays to hire an interior designer. Their goal is to get you the very best quality for the investment you can make , not move the most inventory. ]

Now, back to the white dots.

As you can see from the image below, even images you share now on your Facebook Business Pages are shoppable.

I received this image in my personal News Feed, from a friend of mine who had shared it from Instagram to her Facebook Business Page. This isn’t an anomaly.

Other friends have tested it, and it happens now with almost every image shared to a business’ Facebook Page, whether shared from Instagram or shared directly on the business Page.

Facebook is also using the LENS technology. This technology isn’t exclusive to Google.

You cannot remove the white dots from images you’ve shared on Google or Facebook or Instagram. [ Images with white shoppable dots are only showing in Stories and Explore on Instagram, for the time being: not in feed yet ]

I don’t know for sure if white shoppable dots are showing on Tik Tok, You Tube or Snapchat, but if you know, please let me know in the comments.

The one social site I know for sure where white shoppable dots are not in use, as of this writing, is Linked In and the only search engine site that does not do this, as far as I know now, is Ethos Design Collective.

The popular search engine site Houzz, which adds green shopping tags to images, said in an article shared in Architectural Digest that they allow their community to disable their green shoppable tags, but I cannot find a How To on their site.

If you can find a tutorial on Houzz’s site of how a designer, retailer or manufacturer with images uploaded to Houzz’s site can disable all green shopping tags on their images, please let me know in the comments.

And so far, only Pinterest allows creators to remove the white dots that make their images shoppable. And their removal is only because of the national outcry Pinterest got when blogger and Pinterest creator/expert Kyla Herbes started discussing this issue in her excellent blog posts on this subject.

What can you do if you don’t want your images to be shoppable?

For the time being, [although the technology exists now] videos are not being tagged with lookalike products.

So, only upload videos to searchable content. This means blogs, too, as blogs are searchable online, forever.

And does this take more time? It does. And you don’t have to do it, but at least, if you’ve read this far, you will understand that sales might be leaking from your business due to consumers shopping your uploaded images that have been tagged with lookalike products.

It’s a different world out there now with respect to this aspect of doing business, and I hope this post has helped to make you aware that your customers/clients might need some additional education about value engineered products.

And if you’re a consumer reading this, I hope this post has helped you to realize that: what looks like the look for less often really is LESS.

That product won’t last as long, it doesn’t come with the same warranty, customer service can be spotty or non-existent and eventually, it often ends up taking space in our already massively overcrowded landfills.

Friends reading: if you’ve found this post helpful, please consider sharing it with your networks, and pinning the image below so everyone will know.

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With Gratitude,

Leslie Carothers
Chief Energizing Officer
Savour Partnership