The Blogger Photos Experiment
By Yazan MalakhaGoogle never deletes content off their database; be it caching, Gmail or blogger photo uploads. Sounds hard to believe? That’s what we thought at first. Here’s what we did
Step 1: Create a Blogspot Blog
Step 2: Create a Post and Upload a Photo
Step 3: View the HTML source and copy the URL of the image to notepad
Step 4: Publish The Post (Note even if you don’t publish the photo is already uploaded to the Google Plex)
Step 5: Delete The Blog from the Blog Settings
Step 6: Just to make sure it’s not cached in firefox we fired up Internet Explorer and pasted the Image URL there to check if it still exists
There! The blog doesn’t exist but the image that was uploaded does. Now if that didn’t worry you. This should; Google is primarily a search engine, which means it indexes all those photos. You can search the entire site by clicking here. If you want something specific just add + “keyword” for instance if you’re looking for Peugeot 407 you might want to search for “407.jpg”
The none deletion policy applies to every Google service including cache. So there isn’t any escape from it. Now if you’re stuck with a blogger account and don’t have a Flickr account; I suggest that you go and get yourself one. If you upload way too many photos for a standard flickr account, try giving your photos undescriptive names, like 234234234sdf.jpg.
And remember. All your base are now belongs to Google!
Note: The entire set of screenshots can be downloaded from here
February 26th, 2006 at 2:14 am
digg digg dugg! good post
February 26th, 2006 at 2:35 am
did you delete just the blog or the entire account? I know photos1 and the blogger account are unrelated I’m just curious
February 26th, 2006 at 2:45 am
l33tp3rs0n, thank you I appreciate it.
Derek, I just removed the blog. I will try it again and delete the entire account; but I don’t think it will make a difference. I’ve experienced the same thing with Google Cache. I will report it if the photos are deleted after deleting my blogger account.
February 26th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
[...] El experimento lo han hecho en Techhash, donde demuestran que esto es cierto. En: Weblogs, Google [...]
February 26th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Blogger nunca borra imágenes…
Al parecer Blogger guarda en sus servidores todas las imágenes que suben sus propios usuarios y aunque manden a eliminar desde el panel de control, esta eliminación nunca es física ni real, violando los derechos de los usuarios al retener datos sin con…
February 27th, 2006 at 1:38 am
or simply put a robot.txt and deny all robots to index complete folders or selective files
http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm
February 27th, 2006 at 4:02 am
[...] El experimento lo han hecho en Techhash, donde demuestran que esto es cierto. Posted by ReHe | [...]
February 27th, 2006 at 8:45 am
mozzy you cannot put up a robots.txt file on google’s servers (photos1.blogger.com), can you? if so, please leave the ftp username and password in the comments
March 1st, 2006 at 8:37 am
well
he he
you couold transfe your blogger blog to your own ftp
or you could write google an email and ask them to add it 
March 1st, 2006 at 10:41 am
Mozzy, even with FTP blogger still uploads the photos to photos1.blogger.com
March 1st, 2006 at 7:23 pm
This is not surprising. You need to delete the photo from the photo upload area. The blog only has a link to it.
March 5th, 2006 at 10:45 am
he he,
simple work around. If you alreay have an http://ftp….why to upload from blogger itself? xD
Best solution: Get another blogging software
March 12th, 2006 at 3:20 am
[...] Este experimento demuestra que las fotos que se suben a Blogger permanecen ahi, aún después de borrar el blog. A cada imagen le es asignada una dirección única, y la imagen queda almacenada en el servidor de Blogger, de este modo es posible ver la imagen en un explorador, aún después de haber eliminado el blog. [...]
March 13th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Es que google desea tener dentro de pocos años, la mayor base de datos de imagenes en el mundo, y con nuestro aporte . . ellos podran lograrlo
asi que mucho cuidado . .
y leer detalladamente los acuerdos de registro
antes de presionar “ACEPTAR”
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 am
There has been somewhat a debate in the blogosphere wether or not those using Blogger should host their photos at Blogger for this very reason. I’ll be sure to link to this.
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:37 am
[...] Here is a site-search for photos1.blogger.com on Google Images. (Please note that the search returns some adult photos so you might want to have your search settings on strict filtering. I cannot take full credit for this post as I first read about this on searchenginejournal.com and techhash.com even did what they called the ‘The Blogger Photos Experiment.’ [...]