Users of Google’s image search on desktop are in for a treat as the search giant recently overhauled the interface. Why are we writing about this you ask? It’s because the new look on the image search closely resembles what tablet users have been seeing for a while.
Image search users can now flip through images at a quicker rate while getting larger previews than before. Also when you choose a picture to view from the search results underneath the larger picture will be thumbnails of other relevant pics which can be scrolled through by moving the cursor or the newly added keyboard controls.
As of right now in the current version when you click on an image result a preview page popped out on top of the original search results and in order to change the picture the user has to close the pic and repeat the process. Now with the new interface the preview is incorporated into the search page making image scrolling seamless. This will save people time while they search for the appropriate image.
It’s possible that this change will cause a small loss in traffic for some sites but just like before Google will display the title of the page hosting the image, the website domain name and the image size.
From the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
- 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