Recently, Google Images has received a new update focused on product comparison. Now, it’ll be easier for the user to choose the best product for them. With this update, you can check details like pricing and availability without going to the online store. This update is available right now. However, it’s only available for the desktop version of the images search engine.
As stated by Google in a blog post, this new interface is aiming “to make it easier for you to see what’s out there, learn more about the images you’re interested in, and take the next step toward making your idea happen”.
With this new design, it’ll be easier for you to shop or just compare between products. Now, when you click on an image, a panel will appear on the right side of your screen. This panel will follow you as you scroll down the search results. When you open the panel, you’ll see the selected image with a few different features, including the sharing, and bookmarking options; the product’s details and the related images feature. This last feature also got an update. Now you can see captions with every related image. The company stated that this was added: “so you know where you’re going before you click”.
To navigate between the images in the search results, you can use the two arrows placed on the top right corner of the panel. If you want to go back to the last image you selected, you can click the back button and it will take you to the last image’s position. Finally, you can click on the top left corner to close the panel.
This new interface will also help retailers and publishers. According to Google, people will be more compelled to check the sellers’ websites to buy a product or to ask for more information about a service. Because of this, Google encourages people to adapt their websites so details like pricing, availability, and rating of a product appear on the panel.
With this update, Google is looking to make its image search engine focused on shopping. However, this is not the first change the company has made to Google Images. Earlier this year the company integrated shoppable ads among Google Images’ search results. This is part of Google’s strategy to compete against online shopping sites. This was especially clear during the month of May when Google announced some major changes to Google Shopping as a move to go after Amazon’s customers.
We do hope that the same feature will appear for the mobile version of Google Images, and soon, though Google did not share any info regarding that just yet. This is not the only feature that is available for the desktop website only, as Google custom image search feature suffers the same fate. If you want to upload one of your images in order to search similar ones via Google, you have to either use a desktop PC, or utilize a desktop website view inside your mobile browser, which is far from ideal. We do hope that Google will rectify such issues soon, and bring some of those desktop-only features to smartphones.