Redmond, Washington — Microsoft’s most touted Bing has lately been updating its search engine results pages significantly this year, including an aesthetic and architectural revamp in May, but it seems that Microsoft is not done yet. Today the company announced that image search, which is almost 10 percent of Bing traffic, is getting a major revamp too.
In keeping with the cleaner, more streamlined feel of the new Bing, the new look is gorgeous, and the site now provides larger thumbnails that are scaled to match different aspect ratios after the fashion of Flickr and Yahoo. Other items on the agenda were to create less clutter and improved scrolling in Bing image search, according to Microsoft.
“Our main objective with the new design was to make the images shine,” Jon Noronha, a project manager on Bing’s multimedia team, wrote in an official blog post.
The first thing you will notice, aside from the fact that image thumbnails are pretty larger and really cute, which simply resembles the tight tile-based layout that Pinterest often gets credited for making popular in the past year or so. Both Flickr and Yahoo have recently rolled out similar layouts too.
Microsoft asserts that their Bing search has always been at the epitome of image search results, and with this, they intend to make the entire experience a whole lot more fun and impressive. Of course, to get rid of all of the extra white space around each picture important information like size, location, and title had to go somewhere else. You will now see all of those details when you hover over an image, which also magnifies the preview itself.
Additionally, the search engine’s image search now incorporates some other cool new features like the magnifying glass, which provides a blown-up preview that follows your mouse as you scroll, as well as the filter bar, where users can search by size, color, type, layout, and faces, and below that bar is another list of suggested searches that are similar to your query.
Bing says that seven percent of all of its searches are for images, and all of those users should be seeing the new layout now. The company has also enhanced the profile of search suggestions and trending search notifications, which are featured at the top of a results page and give users info on what other Bingers are looking for.
“We hope the new look will entertain, inspire, and inform you about the world,” Noronha wrote.