[manufacturious]

I was curious and just checked -- until you click on an image in google's search results to see it fullsize in the semi-lightbox, you're actually getting the "thumbnail" sent from google as a b64 encoded string

[curiousgal]

Well, that's good news. thank you for checking, I stand corrected.

[luke-stanley]

I suspect it might just be represented that way in the browser, and that it's not sent that way.

[manufacturious]

Interesting thought, but wouldn't it kinda have to be done that way? Otherwise you'd see missing images on image SERPs, and you'd see the delay of thumbnails loading due to slower source servers.