The revamped page does away with all the text and focuses in the images

Jul 20, 2010 13:43 GMT  ·  By

Google is currently testing a rather experimental search results interface for Image Search. It’s a major revamp of the existing page and does away with most of the text on the page focusing on the images alone. It’s a radical new take for Google, though it is rather similar to Bing’s image search engine.

Some users have been spotting the new interface for at least a week now as Google appears to be testing it in the wild. Google regularly does this for all of its updates to its products. The focus of the revamp has been the image results themselves. Currently, Google lists the results in order of their relevancy and displays some additional information beside the image thumbnail itself like its name, size, file type and the URL of the page where it’s situated.

The new interface in testing does away with all of the additional info and just displays the images stacked together to take up less space. While getting rid of the text helps users focus on the images, the reason they’re there in the first place, the results are rather closely packed and it may be harder to spot smaller images or the ones that don’t stand out.

Hovering the mouse over any image will display all of the meta information so you still get the same amount of data only not at once. Another interesting change is that the new Image Search apparently does away with results pages and opts for an ‘infinite’ scroll approach, again, very similar with what Bing is doing.

The landing page when you decide to follow a particular photo has also been changed. Currently, Google adds a frame on top of the regular page which features the thumbnail image and some info on it. But you still have to search through the page to find the image you’re looking for.

For pages that are generated dynamically but indexed rather infrequently by Google, which is usually the case with blogs, it may mean that the image you want may not even be on the page Google directed you to. In the testing version, Google adds a frame to the right of the page but also brings the image into focus in a popup overlay.

Photo Gallery (5 Images)

The Google Image Search interface in testing
The Google Image Search interface in testing - additional information with mouse hoverThe Google Image Search interface in testing - the new frame
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