New York — Recapturing its lost charm, search portal Yahoo has quietly revealed major changes to its Yahoo Image Search service this morning with a friendlier interface that displays larger images, and makes it easier to browse related thumbnails and the user experience is now better than Google Image Search.
Although Google have all kinds of special collections (such as the new Life Magazine archives) but Yahoo’s image search is just more pleasing to use.
The revamped Yahoo! interface includes more recommended search queries for related images than Google, it also includes a next-image picking slideshow on each image’s page, and an easy direct link to the image itself. Unfortunately, there is not a filter by copyright conditions, which is a major shortcoming.
“Now, when you choose an image from the image search results page, the top bar opens to reveal a richer and sleeker interface that displays a larger view of the image, more search results, and popular related searches,” said the Yahoo Image Search team in the firm’s official Yahoo Search blog.
The new image preview page now has a search box, with search assistance that allows users to quickly and easily search for new images, alongside more image search results which means users do not have to hit the back button to view these.
There is also a convenient list of suggestions associated with queries from other users making similar searches, according to the blog post.
“Try searching for images of beautiful sunsets, faraway places or hot celebs like Brad Pitt,” the blog continued, rather optimistically.
“Our new image search results preview page will help you find what you are looking for — maybe you will even discover something new.”
However, Google’s Image Search interface does not make it as easy to scan through multiple images as quickly, but both could use meaningful support for limiting searches to Creative Commons or public domain images. The new Yahoo! Image Search option of limiting to within or outside of Flickr is not that useful at all.
Nevertheless, it looks pretty impressive with this small change from the search giant and now it seems that for casual image searching, Yahoo may now be the engine of choice for more people.
The bottom line is: Yahoo offers a better user experience, and its revamped Image Search may attract some users to give it a try. And if not for nothing else, it will force Google to pick up its game a little.