14 DAY TRIAL // Google has improved the indexing speed of images and is now making the most of it, by displaying a time stamp showing how fresh a particular image is, if it's only been added in the past few hours or days. This should make it easier to find the newest images, which comes in rather handy for several types of searches.
Google hasn't made any formal announcements, but the changes had been spotted in the wild by users for the past few days. But the company has confirmed this and announced it on its Google Images forum.
"Sometimes when you’re searching for a particular topic, you want to see the most recent images for that subject. For instance, you might want to find images related to the recent Masters Golf Tournament," Google wrote.
"Searching Google Images will give you a lot of images related to the Masters, but it’s hard to quickly tell which pictures are from this year’s tournament," it continued.
"Today, we’re announcing a change which should make finding recent images a lot easier--Google Images with Date Annotations. Now, we’ll add date annotations right to the thumbnails of images that were uploaded recently," it announced.
Doing an image search for any recent event, news, sports, product launches and so on, will now push fresher images to the results. The recent ones are labeled, indicating how old they are.
This comes in handy in other situations as well, if you want to make sure that a photo you're going to use is indeed the most recent, the time stamps make it easier to distinguish it from similar, but older images.
The regular Google Search has displayed a time stamp on certain results for a long time now, so it's good to see that Images is getting some of the love as well.