Google removed the "view image" button from image search results last night.
The change is essentially meant to frustrate users. Google has long been under fire from photographers and publishers who felt that image search allowed people to steal their pictures, and the removal of the view image button is one of many changes being made in response.
There's something old-school stupid about it, like javascript snippets that "block" people from right-clicking on images. It doesn't do what it purports to do, because the image is already downloaded and there are a half-dozen other ways to get it as a nice convenient jpg on your desktop! Not least simply dragging and dropping it. It barely, but certainly achieves one thing only: to slightly reduce the quality and convenience of Google Images to satisfy people who are mad at a button. They'll presumably be satisifed by its disappearance, then alarmed to find that nothing changes because the people who systematically rip them off weren't using it.
