Thursday, January 24, 2013

Google Image Search Gets Faster, ‘More Beautiful’

google-logoGoogle is all about being beautiful these days. In the earnings call talk that Larry Page gave to analysts and investors on Tuesday he said the following:

We’ve talked a lot about excellence and velocity over the last year. While many claim it’s my nature never to be satisfied, we’ve actually made real progress creating more beautiful and more intuitive products.

Well it looks like that message is now a Google mantra. Here is how Associate Product Manager, Hongy Li, describes the new Google image search in a post at the Webmaster Central blog.

People looking for images on Google often want to browse through many images, looking both at the images and their metadata (detailed information about the images). Based on feedback from both users and webmasters, we redesigned Google Images to provide a better search experience. In the next few days, you’ll see image results displayed in an inline panel so it’s faster, more beautiful, and more reliable.

Wow. That’s just like, more beautiful, man.

Now to the actual product enhancements. First, here’s a look.

faster-search

Now, the description of the upgrades

-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’re 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. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.

-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. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.

Of interest is the third point where Google is hoping to help clickthroughs to the source page of the image by adding two new ‘clickable targets’ to the image presentation.

Are you looking forward to these changes? Will this help you as a marketer? Let us know in the comments.

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Source : internetwebsitedesign[dot]biz

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