If you want the image, we all know how to find it, get it. How big of an annoyance is this?
A lot of times I am looking for images which are in the public domain, and for which if I go to the page in question, I have to then sort through dozens of images to find the one I had been looking at already in the search.
Here's an example. I've just done a search, found an image that I want to view larger, the image is long since in the public domain, but when I click on "visit" I get a page with a list of text links that I now have to sort through to find the full image:
https://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kee...
Edit to add:
Now that I look closer, I notice that Google is actually embedding the original image, instead of a preview (they load a low-res preview, and then replace that with a hotlinked image), so you can just right click and choose "view image" now to work around this.
I guess that's OK for people who are technically inclined enough to know that you can do that.
I have a bias where I'm OK with the fact that people who take the time to learn the capabilities of the tools they use get better results from them. I figured this out within about 30 seconds of noticing that the view image button was gone, after sending feedback to say I didn't like the change.
This would be the wrong bias if I was designing a product. Of course, a product will be most successful if it maximizes discoverability and doesn't make the user think, which is exactly what Google has been coerced in to rolling back here.
Do you think that’s a valid justification to give the person who hosted it no credit and traffic for their work, instead choosing to leech the image directly from their server at their cost? The fact that they built a page around the image with relevant keywords that is the only reason you found it through Google in the first place. There’s nothing stopping someone from building a public domain image search that hosts its own images, but you went to Google for convenience.
Google does exactly that through "view cached/text only". You need to specifically opt your site out of the caching thing. I guess they could have done exactly that with images for those who complained.
There is no hit-and-miss experience with the "View image" feature -- you get access to exactly what you came looking for, and in a more convenient and speedy way.
So, with your search engine, you'd put in keywords to describe an image, it would then look at the webpages' text to figure out, if the image on there might be relevant, then it would present the images that it has found, so that you can select the webpage that you want to go to based on the image which's surrounding text on the webpage suits your keywords.
That does sound like a cool concept for a search engine, but ultimately just the regular web search will do the same without the fuzziness of images added in between.
As a result, I don't know anyone who uses image search to find a webpage.