How do images on Google work?

[Gan The Grey]

More specifically, how is that I can search for an image, get a whole page with choices, click on one, and then it tells me that the server isn't available? How can they show me a smaller version of the picture without being able to access the webpage it was posted on?

[Dallas-Dakota]

They probable use a cache'd(not live) version.

If you have the site/image location, you can just search it and there should be a cache'd version below the description somewhere.

[randman22222]

Conjecture: It would seem that as Google's search database is updated, it saves thumbnails of the images it indexes. If you would like, I'd be more than happy to track down the webmasters of your missing images.