I guess this is my 15 minutes of fame (?)

I was going about my business. It was the night before an anime convention, Cosvision, and I wanted to figure out what coat would go along with my cosplay. 

 

I did as one does when utterly baffled and went to my dear friend, Google, for advice. I put the name of the character (Lu Guang from Link CLick) in the search and kept scrolling, trying to find a good full body picture of the character for reference.

 

I was not prepared for the shock of my life.

 

 

There it was, my own fanart. Staring at me. Straight to my face.

 

 

And quite high in the search results, too, all things concidered. 

 

I just wanted to figure out my cosplay, dammit.

 

I was not mentally ready to have a crisis over this at 1 AM the night before a convention, alright, but that’s precisely what I proceeded to do.

 

So, I took it to my Instagram stories, as one does (in the middle of a crisis), where one of my friends pointed out that my Quanxi fanart also shows up very high in the results.

 

And indeed it does.

 

 

Let the emotional distress worsen.

 

But no, I could not afford that. So, I managed to go to sleep, put on my cosplay, travel to the convention, and forget about it for a while. Until I returned to it a few days later.

 

You see, it is not only my Lu Guang or my Quanxi fanarts. There are 2 more. 4 in total. And there might be more that I didn’t search for yet.

 

 

 

And these two are wayyyy too high in the results for my liking.  Full on panic mode activated. Damn.

 

 

 

This feels surreal.

 

And nothing like this will probably happen again so this might just be my 15 minutes of fame ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

But it did make me think.

 

What actually contributes to what shows up in the search results?

 

According to my quick (with serious emphasis on the word) research and trying to look for patterns in the results, these factors are important:

• how the file is named
• the image file size
• alt text
• location
• relevancy

 

I think these explain why Instagram images rarely show up in the results. All of my images that show up are either from Twitter or DeviantArt. Those are the three social medias I use to upload my art. 

 

 

With DeviantArt there is a clear consistency between what I gave as the title for the image and what I put in the search engine – that being the full name of the character and the series they are from. If swapped around, the search image results might be different.

 

Instagram, on the other hand, crops the images into smaller sizes and most likely changes the names, so that explains why they don’t show up. For the alt texts for any of these platforms…I cannot say.

 

As for other relevancy factors, all of these four images have relatively high engagement on the platforms. (Other than Quanxi. It links the DeviantArt for that one even though it has very little favourites there and quite a lot of likes on Twitter. I can’t wrap my head around that one.)

 

I also ran a test where my friend was the one to look up the images, not me. And they did find them as well, but they were a bit lower. So that is most likely the location and relevancy toying with the results.

 

But if I did learn anything from these statistics, it’s that if you want your pictures to show up, make sure to name them correctly and use Twitter (or something). I don’t even know if it’s socially acceptable to recommend DeviantArt these days in any shape or form.

 

 

I do not know how much people clicking on these images on google factors into how high they are in the results. And I would like to learn more about that but, frankly…

 

The results scare me

 

 

 

If I have learned anything from my girl Quanxi, it’s that “Ignorance is bliss” because honestly, I do not want to know how many people have clicked on my art. Already knowing it’s on Google for so many people to see gave me anxiety which then led to a crisis and I can’t take another one back to back, oh no, oh god please no-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would like to thank the ever unpredictable Finnish weather for sponsoring this mental breakdown.

 

 

 

 

Sincerely, an artist in the middle of a crisis