Mountain View, California — In a fresh move to keep pace with its rivals, search engine behemoth Google on Wednesday announced that it is revamping its image search feature on Google.com that its claims is faster, more beautiful, and more reliable. The company also says that users will see the new look “in the next few days” but would not impart any more specific beyond that.
With the update gradually advancing, Google says that soon people will be able to simultaneously view images and image information while searching for photos, illustrations, and graphics. In other words, the perfect blend of old Google (fast, reliable) and new Google (usable, pretty).
Old Google image search returned a grid of images, which users could click on to see larger, and click again to go to the originating site. The new design displays images in an inline panel and lets you quickly flip through a set of images by using the keyboard (we assume this will also work on touchscreens eventually with gestures):
Google Images enhances its search result. (Credit: Google) Click to enlarge…
“Based on feedback from both users and webmasters, we overhauled Google Images to render a better search experience,” Google Images Associate Product Manager Hongyi Li wrote in a blog post today. “In the next few days, you will see image results displayed in an inline panel so it is faster, more beautiful, and more reliable.”
As with the current search concept, when users look up for images, they see large thumbnail images for whatever they are searching. For instance, the “Pacific Ocean” brings up images of maps, photos of sandy islands covered in palm trees, and pictures of waves crashing on rocks. If the user wants to know more about the image, they have to hover their mouse over it and then click to get more.
The company elaborating on the updated features, claims that returning to browsing other search results is as simple as just scrolling down and picking up right where you left off. Yet this is more than just a visual update: the search giant is finally going to show useful information about the images it is surfacing.
As a matter of fact, Google’s images section will soon display comprehensive information (the metadata) right below it in the search results; more specifically, key information will be shown much more prominently next to each image such as: the title of the page hosting it, the domain name it comes from, and its size. Besides, Webmasters will also be happy to hear that the domain name in the results is now clickable along with the visit page button, basically doubling the number of clickable targets on an image result to four.
Here are some of the changes explained by Li:
-
We now display detailed information about the image (the metadata) right underneath the image in the search results, instead of redirecting users to a separate landing page.
-
We are featuring some key information much more prominently next to the image: the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size.
-
The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on.
-
The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view. This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews.
In fact, the biggest improvement with Google image search will come from its speedier image loading, as the source page would not load in an iframe in the background of the image detail view anymore. This should speed up the experience for users, reduce the load on the source website’s servers, and help with the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as page views.