Posted on 21 July 2010

CopyCats! Google Copies Bing in Image Search Revamp…Literally.

Google yesterday revamped its Image Search service, in a way that seems like a copy and paste of Bing’s Image search service. In the new Google Image Search, Only Images are shown, and you do not have to click to go to different pages, you can scroll down the page to at least a viewing of 1,000 images!

In its blog announcement, here’s what Google had to say;

When you think about “information,” what probably comes to mind are streams of words and numbers. Google’s pretty good at organizing these types of information, but consider all the things you can’t express with words: what does it look like in the middle of a sandstorm? What are some great examples of Art Nouveau architecture? Should I consider wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional cake?

This is why we built Google Images in 2001. We realized that for many searches, the best answer wasn’t text—it was an image or a set of images. The service has grown quite a bit since then. In 2001, we indexed around 250 million images. By 2005, we had indexed over 1 billion. And today, we have an index of over 10 billion images.

It’s not just about quantity, though. Over the past decade we’ve been baking deep computer science into Google Images to make it even faster and easier for you to find precisely the right images. We not only finds images for pretty much anything you type in; we can also instantly pull out images of clip art, line drawings, faces and even colors.

Here’s what’s new in this refreshed design of Google Images:

  • Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
  • Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
  • Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
  • A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
  • Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
  • Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

Google also launched a new ad format called Image Search Ads. These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text.

You can read the full announcement here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/ooh-ahh-google-images-presents-nicer.html

2 Comments

  1. Poahu says:

    damn shame…

  2. Poahu says:

    damn shame…

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