Google Image Search comparison for Smugmug, Pbase and Panoramio

I published this comparison on smugmug's DGrin forum on march 17, 2009 and still no reaction of any kind from Smugmug.

Inspired by this thread and a video from Google's Peter Linsley about "Get up-to-date on Image Search":
Video (15 min): http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...ge-search.html

I asked myself:
How good is SM doing on Google Image Search (GIS)? And how good is the visitor experience with people coming from GIS?

I tried many different keywords (with between 500 and 999 hits in SM excellent search engine) and the word "caracara" turned up to be give about average result for SM. Thumbnails from SM are very unreliable in Google Image search. Most of them do not lead you to a caracara in SM (Google Earth files, Thumbnail from today’s popular etc). Thumbnails will not likely turn up in a any Google Image Search and that is good, especially for a visitor and also for SM, so I counted only images before the first Thumbnail.

I Have chosen to compare with Pbase because they also have an inside search engine which I could use, and Panoramio because it is owned by Google, so this gives an estimate of the practical percentage of images you can expect to see in GIS. (Just like Flickr images in Yahoo image search),

Images in SM: 783 and 100% accurate.
Images in GIS: 15 and 66% accurate. Typical res 400x268. 5 linking to a www-URL, 5 linking to a Nickname-URL and 5 photos not linking to a caracara in SM.
Note: SM removes the frame when clicking an image from GIS, which makes it impossible to hit the "Back" for continuing the image search. This is really annoying.
Verdict for SM: 1.91% of images in GIS with poor resolution - and a bad user experience.

to comparison: result for Pbase:
Images in Pbase: 1408 - 100% accurate
Images in GIS: 223 - 100% accurate. Typical res 800x500
Verdict for Pbase: 15.83% of images in GIS with medium resolution - and a very good user experience.

to comparison with my images in panoramio which are not in my SM galleries:
Images in panoramio : 44
Images in GIS: 23 - 100% accurate. typical res 1100x800
Verdict for Panoramio(alone): 52.27% of images in GIS with original resolution - and a very good user experience.
(Theese photos do not exists anywhere else on the internet)

to comparison with my images in panoramio which are also in my SM galleries:
Images in panoramio : 36
Images in GIS: 7 - 100% accurate. typical res 1100x800
Verdict for Panoramio(+SM): 19.44% of images in GIS -with original resolution and a very good user experience.
(I cannot give an explanation to this - GIS might find similar images in SM and regard them as dublicates or ????)
(I have moved half of these images to a gallery not seen by SM or Google to see if this will make a difference. The weeks to come will tell)