Image search gets revamp

Google last week launched a major redesign of its image search, an effort intended to open a new source of advertising revenue for the search giant and parry competition from Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Google won't say what share of its searches are for photos and other images, but says image searches have become one of its most popular search functions - receiving 1 billion page views a day.

Bing's growing traffic for image searches was one area of success Microsoft executives cited recently when they met the media to mark the first anniversary of Bing's launch.

The revamp of Google Image Search, the most extensive redesign since the service was launched in 2001, includes new features like an "infinite scroll", which gives users up to 1000 images per search page, a "hover pane" that pulls up a larger image and data about the image when users place their cursor over it, and a better landing page that can more easily take users to the web page where the image is stored.

Google also launched Image Search Ads, a service that allows advertisers to buy space to display images of their related products along with the results of users' image searches.

"We really think this new interface is the best in the world," Google's vice-president for search products and experience, Marissa Mayer, said.

"We give you better information about the image on the result page so you can make a better decision about what image you are interested in," Google director of search products Ben Ling said.

The revamped image search, which now indexes more than 10 billion images, launched last week.

It will run only on newer web browsers, such as Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox version 3.0 and later, Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

Google says image search has become a source of entertainment for people who scroll through pictures of national parks, exotic beaches or celebrities, or browse paintings, photos or drawings.

But another main use is to seek out travel destinations and products, such as photos of European capitals or shoe fashions, and Google hopes to use that behaviour as a revenue opportunity by offering the new advertising format.

A search for "Edward Hopper Cape Cod", for example, also turned up adverts offering people the chance to see and buy posters of the artist's paintings.

Because those adverts feature actual images of a product, Google believes they will generate more advertising revenue than a text ad bundled with a standard search, although executives declined to say how much.

"We expect users to get higher value from those ads because they will be seen in the relevant context, so we expect there will be a premium over text ads," Mr Ling said.

In San Francisco recently, Microsoft executives said Bing's image searches, which already included an infinite scroll feature, were growing at an even faster rate than its general web search.

Google executives hinted that some of the features included in image search, such as a continuous scroll, could soon find their way to Google's main search function.

Now, users must click a link to get succeeding pages of results.

While there are some technical difficulties in bringing that feature to text searches, "I think it has some potential for that", Ms Mayer said.

•  Those who prefer the tradional Google image view can revert to that by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on 'Switch to basic view'.