Asset search has gotten a lot worse

Using the built in asset search has gotten terrible it feels like. Before you would get a lot more results, sometimes kind of random like they were pulled off of an google image search but now i get more or less nothing, other then "premium assets". I guess this is to drive premium purchases but come on. 90% of the time it feels like its trying to scam me, take random search such as "gaming table", that gives me 3 premium assets as a result. Take that same search query to  google images and filter to transparent and i get around 20 good results on the first page alone.  I get that there are copyright issues and such, but my point is that back in the day there were a lot more results.  I also know that i can upload the pictures myself(something i do a lot of the time) but upload space is limited, and later sorting though all the uploads to delete is a pain. Would have been great if we could just use some more open search engine, or let us input links to images that are hosted elsewhere.

The built in search has been disconnected from google for a while. Cache returns are slowly dissappearing. 

Continuing from what Pat said, as the Devs said over here : After doing some digging, this is what's the cause of this issue: Back in the early days of Roll20, Google's search engine API was free and readily available to be used. This was utilized for our web search for the Art Library. At the time, Google had claimed that this would be a freely available asset for a long time. As you can probably guess where this story is going, they decided later to lock their API behind a very significant price tag. Nowadays, when someone runs searches in the art library, it's using search results that we scraped back when we still had the API available. Those search results are tied to the keywords that were searched with at the time. This list of compiled searches are nearly four years old now, and limited to the keywords that were utilized by a fraction of the userbase that we have now. Ideally, we would find another search engine API to utilize, but so far we haven't found one that is financially feasible to license. When things change it will be announced, but for now we're stuck with what we have.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to use the search engine of your choice to search for freely available game assets. It's just not all in-game.

Considering that Google just disabled the direct links to image results, it is getting more and more cumbersome to quickly add an image or token to your game.

Arthur B said: Considering that Google just disabled the direct links to image results, it is getting more and more cumbersome to quickly add an image or token to your game. A little background on this;&nbsp; <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google</a>... Seems that "Open image in a new tab" and "copy image address" is still available from the browser's context menu though, at least for now... There's always inspect element (my favorite imgur tool...).

Thanks Vince. I was aware of the background behind google's change. I just pointed out that gets continuously more cumbersome when you quickly need a certain image or token.

Arthur B said: Thanks Vince. I was aware of the background behind google's change. I just pointed out that gets continuously more cumbersome when you quickly need a certain image or token. I was unaware of Google's change (+1 for the heads up), so I thought other's might like a little background is all.&nbsp; I agree it's become "more cumbersome".&nbsp; Hopefully the sidebar will get some love in the near future...

Vince said: I was unaware of Google's change (+1 for the heads up), so I thought other's might like a little background is all.&nbsp; I agree it's become "more cumbersome".&nbsp; Hopefully the sidebar will get some love in the near future... Sorry, then I just misinterpreted your posting. But yeah, it would be nice if roll20 could polish up the search a bit.

For those who are unaware, you can download an extension called "google search "view image" button" for chrome that will add the "view image" back to google images results.

Excellent find, Motion.

Motion said: For those who are unaware, you can download an extension called "google search "view image" button" for chrome that will add the "view image" back to google images results. THANK YOU! This is a huge part of the work flow in my day job.