Mountain View, California — Google on Tuesday announced that it is unveiling a new design for its popular Google Images search service, adding a number of attributes that should allow consumers to more quickly and easily find online pictures and art, along with a polished landing page and what the company said was more relevant search results.
The Mountain View search engine giant demonstrated the major redesign of the existing page and does away with most of the text on the page focusing on the images alone, going live to users in batches throughout the week, during a news conference Tuesday at its San Francisco offices. It is a radical new take for Google, though it is rather similar to Bing’s image search engine.
The new interface under experiment uncluttered all of the additional info and just displays the images stacked together to take up less space. While getting rid of the text helps users focus on the images, the reason they are in the first place, the results are rather closely packed and it may be harder to spot smaller images or the ones that does not stand out.
Now, the initial Google Images search will produce 1,000 results per page, which will be accessible through an “infinite scroll” function, allowing consumers to quickly browse without having to click from page to page. Moreover, hovering the mouse over any image will display all of the meta information so you still get the same amount of data only not at once. Another interesting change is that the new Image Search apparently does away with results pages and opts for an “infinite scroll” approach, again, very similar with what Bing is doing.
“Once you click on an image, you are taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it is hosted on visible right behind it,” explains Google Images Product Manager Nate Smith. “Click anywhere outside the image, and you are right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.”
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Furthermore, Google will be transitioning from text-based ads on the page to a more image-based ad format, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. Interestingly, that also means that Google may be transitioning away from strictly text-based ads.
“We really consider this user interface is the best in the world, with the interface stripping it down and highlighting the image,” Mayer said. Executives also said that they are continuing to iterate the interface.
When Google introduced Images as a beta site in 2001, it barely had 250 million images that were indexed then, according to Ben Ling, director of search. By 2005, 1 billion images were included, and today, more than 10 billion images are online, Ling said. Google records over a billion page views per day on Google Images.
Google does not have an explicit tool to search by time right now, as Google has done with Google social search. That will be added over time, Ling said.
Google has already started to roll the page out, and it is available to about 10 percent of users. By the end of the week, all users should have access, Google executives said. For now, the site will be for desktop PCs only, running Chrome, Safari, Firefox 3.0 and up, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8.