Some images are base64 in URLs in Google image search results for their thumbnails. Does anyone have any idea why?
Search "Pepsi can" and some when you right click > copy image address will result in "data:image/jpeg;base64,/.../" instead of the website's image. Presumably to limit server cost / make the browser render? It's not for all sites, so perhaps more common sites (Walmart for example) it gives the correct image URL.
Specifically for a gallery page of search results, I'd guess that it's to provide a more-consistent experience.
When you load that results page, you'd be reaching out to ~100+ different domains that will respond and render the images at different rates (and some will fail to load at all). Base64-encoding lets you shove binary content into caches like Redis, retrieval and embedding of which would be preferable to hotlinking to a slow site. Then most of the page gets rendered at the same time client-side.
When you load that results page, you'd be reaching out to ~100+ different domains that will respond and render the images at different rates (and some will fail to load at all). Base64-encoding lets you shove binary content into caches like Redis, retrieval and embedding of which would be preferable to hotlinking to a slow site. Then most of the page gets rendered at the same time client-side.