What do you think of Google’s new image search and the image search ads? Aside from getting a whole new UI, Google Images will now allow advertisers to target image search key phrases/words and advertise by including images with their ads.
As for the user interface overhaul, here are some of the changes that Google introduced for its Image Search UI:
The layout and positioning of the images on the search page is much more “full”. Details that would normally appear under the image, like the dimensions, the website the image is hosted on, and the alt attribute text for the image, are now gone.
Old Google Image Search UI
New Google Image Search UI
Hovering your cursor over any image on the page “pops” out a slightly larger version of that image with all of the aforementioned info displayed:
New Google UI - hovering over an image
Clicking on an image takes you to a version of the page on which it’s hosted. The image is displayed in the foreground with the rest of the side faded out behind it whereas before, the image would open in a new frame above the rest of the results.
Viewing and individual image
However, it looks like Google still makes use of frames on the new page that comes up when clicking on an individual image.
I wish I could right click the image to save it, but it looks like that’s not an option (at least not in Safari). You can still open the image file individually and save through that, but it would really be more convenient to not have to do that each time you want to save an image.
The other great thing is that you can see something like 1000 images on the same page just by scrolling – no more clicking through pages. Google Images doesn’t load each page sector until you scroll down to it. So if you load page 1, then scroll all the way down to page 50 – the only pages that should be loaded are pages 1 and 50, nothing inbetween.
I quite like the new UI so far, but I’ll have to use it a bit longer to make up my mind.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hey Liza,
I personally LUV it. The other day I was looking for an iphone case I bought awhile back from an online company but totally forget the name of the site.
So I typed in the description on google, and wallaah~ over a 200 images on one page, the best thing would definitely be the original website the images are from once I highlighted over the image with my mouse.
It made it easy for me to track down the site I once purchased on of my most beloved iphone cases.
Google images for the win!