Sunnyvale, California — Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc., on Wednesday launched a new version for its image search, with a tiled look on results pages, and a new layout, viewer, and Facebook integration.
The new image search results page is embellished with a neatly tiled look with each image equally sized. The new design aligns pictures in a more organized fashion and also pulls relevant content from social media pages. Upon hovering your mouse over the image, the image will become larger and a relevant caption will also be displayed so you get a better look at it.
The new layout for image results has three tabs at the top for Top Results, Galleries, and Facebook. The first displays the standard Web results, the second indexes related galleries on Flickr, Yahoo News, and OMG, and the third offers results from your Facebook friends’ photos if you have linked your Facebook account to your Yahoo account.
Now, when a user enters a query into Yahoos’ image search, they are welcomed by a results page that arranges images into neat columns and rows. Each image is uniformly sized, as opposed to Google’s image search, which displays photos scaled to their native resolution.
Clicking on any result image now brings up a sort of slideshow viewer, it pops up in a new window with buttons for you to scroll left and right — no more having to go back and forth between pages just to jump to the next result, along with a panel on the right that lets you jump to an image or play them all as a slideshow.
“One of the most noteworthy changes we have made to Yahoo! Image Search is the way images are displayed and navigated,” says Yahoo’s Girish Ananthakrishnan. “By clicking on any image on the search results page, the image will appear on a fresh page allowing users to browse effortlessly through full-size images with a simple click on the desktop browser.”
Yahoo has also improved on speed as images appear quickly, at first in low resolution, but as the full image is downloaded, it reaches full sharpness. But the handiest part of this viewer is that the full site page where the image came from is displayed in a frame below–something you would not find in either Bing or Google.
The image search also has three category tabs for you to better filter your results: Latest, Galleries and Facebook. The first one will be Top Images, which of course displays you the images that best match your search criteria, it will show image search results of trending topics, such as events, celebrities and news. This tab will automatically appear for certain queries. Next is the Galleries tab that will provide you search results from photo galleries like Yahoo! News, Flickr and OMG. The last is the social media Facebook tab – if you have linked your account with Yahoo! Image Search, then the Facebook tab will search through all the photographs from your albums and those of your friends, using names, album names, and album descriptions.
Images play a vital role in search engine visibility, and it is wise to keep pace with any new features that the major search engines roll out. So, when businesses are devising their search engine optimized content, it is crucial to include pictures in your SEO strategy. Pictures using targeted keywords will show up in relevant image searches, giving marketers another way to reach consumers. The new feature also suggests Facebook marketers might want to share optimized photos with fans to gain extra exposure.
However, one way Bing and Google Image search still beat Yahoo’s is that they adopted an “infinite scroll,” letting you continuously retrieve more images that match your search terms as you scroll down the page, without necessitating a click of a “Next” link.
Nevertheless, the new functionalities on the Bing-powered Yahoo search engine comes as Microsoft’s portal continues to gain momentum in the search market.