Google Image Search has a different way to display suggestions: it now shows a long list of colorful boxes with related searches. You can click one or more boxes to dynamically refine search results.


For example, when searching for [sportswear], Google shows suggestions like: [women basketball], [tennis], [badminton], [golf], [volleyball], [nike woman], [alexander wang], [adidas], [fashion], [performance], [vintage], [trendy], [urban], [school], [gym], [90's], [70's], [vogue], [luxe], [avant garde], [korean], [italian], [french] and more. It's interesting to notice that each category of suggestions has a different color.




Here's the old interface, which had fewer suggestions and displayed thumbnails next to suggestions:

Google Image Search's mobile interface tests a new feature that starts playing snippets from a YouTube video at the top of the search results page. It's not disclosed as an ad, there's no sound and you can't stop or hide the video, which continues to play on repeat.



Right now, the experiment seems to be limited to fashion-related queries like [men jackets], [lookbook], [winter outfit], which match videos from YouTube channels like New Look and River Island. "New Look is a South African-owned British global fashion retailer with a chain of high street shops. (...) The chain sells womenswear, menswear, and clothing for teens," according to Wikipedia.

Google only shows labels like: "New Look on YouTube", even though this looks like an experimental ad format. I hope it will never become a regular feature, as it's pretty annoying and it wastes Internet bandwidth.

Google Image Labeler used to be a game that helped Google categorize images and improve image search. It was launched in 2006 and discontinued in 2013. Now Image Labeler is back, but it's no longer a game.

If you go to get.google.com/crowdsource/imagelabeler/category, you'll see this message: "Ready to help Google Image Labeler? Look at a few public images to see if Google is organizing them right."


Then you can pick a category like birds, cats, dancing, concerts, food, cars, mountains, sky. If you use this URL: get.google.com/crowdsource/imagelabeler?label_str=Dogs, you can add your own category (replace "Dogs" in the address bar with something different like Rainbows, Stairs or Moon).


Google shows Creative Commons images from Flickr categorized by Google's algorithms. You only need to answer to questions like "Does this image contain dancing?".

Google's product listing ads are now available in mobile Google Image Search. They're placed above the list of image search results and look much like the shopping ads from web search. Google also shows a colorful list of related keywords you can add to your query: brands, colors, categories and more.


"Whether they're looking for a new sofa or the perfect pair of earrings, people who search and shop on their smartphones at least once a week say that product images are the shopping feature they turn to most. And it turns out, the top questions Google Images users ask us are 'What's the price of this?’ and ‘Where can I buy it?'. That's why we are introducing Shopping ads on image search," informs Google.


Here's the "shop on Google" section from web search.

Google's image search engine now shows rich snippets for shopping sites like Amazon and eBay, but only when you use the mobile interface. Google displays the name of the product, the price, the rating and the number of reviews, stock information and a short description. There's also a message that asks users to "check website for latest pricing and availability".


Google Image Search is pretty useful for finding products and the new snippets include even more information. I'd like to see a filtering option for products in web search and image search, now that Google Product Search only shows paid listings (also known as ads) and "payment is one of several factors used to rank these results".

It looks the Google Save site is not restricted to bookmarking image search results. The "Save to Google" Chrome extension lets you save any web page and add tags. "One spot for webpages and Images: Your saved webpages and saved images from Google Image Search will live together at google.com/save," mentions Google.

In fact, the saving feature from Google Image Search actually bookmarks the web page that includes the image and automatically selects the image you are saving to display it next to the site's name. The Chrome extension lets you save any web page and you can pick an image from that page.


If there's no image to pick, Google shows the first letter from the title of the page.



If Google wants to create a general-purpose bookmarking site, then it could also integrate with Google Web Search and sync with Chrome bookmarks.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

Last year, Google added a feature that allowed you to save image search results and organize them using tags. This feature was only available in the mobile interface, but now you can use it on the desktop too. Just click the "save" button next to an image search result and then click "view saved" to go to google.com/save and manage your saved images.




"This feature is currently available in the US when you search for images on desktop and in your mobile browser. To try it out, make sure you're logged into your browser with your Google Account; then you can start image searching and saving," informs Google.

The site mentions that the "website links you save using the Save to Google extension for Chrome can also be found here," but I couldn't find this extension. There's a Save to Google Drive extension, but it only saves images and screenshots to Google Drive.

Google tweaked the mobile search interface. There's now a menu that lets you view the original image, open the list of saved images, search by image and send feedback. There's also a redundant "visit page" link below the image.


Google brought back the title of the page and that's a good thing because you can find more details about the image. Hopefully, Google will also bring back the snippets.



You can find some screenshots for the old interface in this post.

If you find beautiful images using Google Image Search's mobile site, you can save them and organize them using a new Google service. Just tap the star icon next to a search result and the image is saved to your account. Go to google.com/save to see all the images and add tags or notes (the link only works from mobile Chrome and Safari).





"When using your phone or tablet's web browser, you can easily save images you find in Google search results as links. You can see your saved images, which are similar to bookmarks, when you're signed in to your Google Account. You can return to your saved images at any time and add tags to organize them," informs Google.

I'm not sure if this is a new feature, but I noticed that Google indexes images from PDF files. Google adds "[PDF]" next to the title of the page and offers a single option: "view PDF", since it can't link to an image from a PDF file.


Back in 2008, Google started to use OCR to index the full text of scanned PDF files. Now Google extracts images from PDF files and makes them searchable.

Here's an example of query that returns many images from PDFs: [google pdf site:static.googleusercontent.com].

Google Image Search has a new mobile interface. When you tap a thumbnail, Google shows the image result, a link to the page and a long list of related images.


Below the search result, you can find a list of similar images. You can still swipe left or right to go to the previous or the next image result. Tap the image to hide everything else.

When you select a result in Google Image Search, you can now see more related images. Google used to display 8 related images, but now there are 7 related images and a "view more" option that shows a long list of similar images.


If you spot an image you like, it's now easier to find related images.


You can also use the "search by image" feature and click "visually similar images" to find images that closely resemble the search result you've picked.

Now you no longer have to open the advanced search page to restrict the Google Image Search results to Creative Commons pics or public domain images. Just click "search tools" below the search box, then click "usage rights" and pick one of the options: "labeled for reuse", "labeled for commercial reuse", "labeled for reuse with modification" or "labeled for commercial reuse with modification". You'll find many pictures from Flickr and Wikipedia.



Visit the page, find the license and make sure it's right for you. You should always link to the page, mention the author and the source. "Before reusing content that you've found, you should verify that its license is legitimate and check the exact terms of reuse stated in the license. For example, most licenses require that you give credit to the image creator when reusing an image. Google has no way of knowing whether the license is legitimate, so we aren't making any representation that the content is actually or lawfully licensed," informs Google.


Google should replace the message "Images may be subject to copyright" with the Creative Commons license.

{ via Search Engine Land }

Google updated the mobile interface for Image Search launched in October. I've only noticed the change in Chrome and Safari for iPhone, but it doesn't seem to be an experiment.

Google now shows a three-dot menu with options like "visit page", "view image", "send feedback" and "search by image", instead of using links. You can still swipe to go to the next or previous image result and tapping the image sends you to the most relevant page that includes it.

Google Image Search shows an animation below the search result's thumbnail while the original image is downloaded. As you probably noticed, Google first shows the thumbnail, which is already loaded as part of the search results page, then it replaces the thumbnail with the full-size image when you click a result.

Update: This is not a new feature. Thanks, +Sushubh Mittal.


The animation is especially useful for large images, since you may have to wait a few seconds until the images are downloaded. Here's an example and here's the animation:

One of the features that was removed in the current Google Image Search interface is snippets. Now Google only shows the title of the page, the domain and the size of the image in pixels. Snippets used to reveal more information about the photo or the page that includes the image, just like the snippets that are used for all the other search results.

Google considers bringing back snippets. Here's a screenshot from a Google experiment:


In this case, the snippet is quite useful, but very long: "the company's energy supply. This makes the Googleplex one of the USA's largest corporate solar installations. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to take photos on the roof, so here's one Google made earlier."

Google's regular interface doesn't show snippets:

One of the features I've always wanted to see in Google Image Search is slideshows. Google lets you quickly go to the next image result using the right arrow shortcut, but a slideshow button would make things even easier. Picasa Web search used to have this feature. I know that webmasters will say that this wastes their bandwidth, so let's get past this.

It turns out that Yahoo already has this feature. Yahoo's search results are powered by Microsoft Bing, but Yahoo has its own UI and it does a pretty good job. Yahoo uses the same infinite scrolling interface (Google borrowed it from Bing), but things look different once you click a search result. Images occupy the entire page and you can click the small "play" button at the bottom of the page to start a slideshow or just use the "p" keyboard shortcut. There are some cool zoom effects for big images and, if you use a browser that supports the HTML5 fullscreen API (Chrome/Firefox for desktop and Android, Safari for desktop), you can click the "view fullscreen" button at the top of the page and only see the images. You may want to restrict the results to large images.



Yahoo has a similar interface for the mobile search engine and it looks more like the old Google Image Search for mobile. The new Google interface has some benefits if you don't want to see all the results sequentially, but the old UI placed more emphasis on the images. The nice thing is that Yahoo has the slideshow button in the mobile interface, as well.

Google's image search engine has a new interface for smartphones and tablets. The new UI looks just like the desktop UI, but you can use swipes to navigate between the image results.

Here are some screenshots from my Nexus 7. When you tap an image result, a black box with a bigger version of the image will open. You can also find some additional information about the image.


Swipe left to see the next image result, swipe right to go to the previous result. Gestures work just like the left/right keyboard shortcuts in the desktop interface. Tap an image to open the page that includes it.


A similar interface is available for smartphones. Here's a screenshot from an iPhone running iOS7:


Google will probably say that it changed the interface to make it more consistent and provide an unified interface for both desktop and mobile devices. There are some other advantages: you can scroll down to see more results, you can scroll up and quickly change the query or switch to web search.

I find the old interface more intuitive and better suited for mobile devices. It made it more obvious that you can use gestures by showing the previous and the next image result, search results didn't move around and you could find more information about the images. The new smartphone interface only displays the domain name and it no longer shows the title of the page and the image size (the tablet interface still shows them). Here's a screenshot of the old UI: