14 DAY TRIAL // Last summer, Google introduced a revamped Image Search, the first major update since the specialized search engine launched. It's been improving on it since, but now some of the changes are finally making their way into the main search engine.
Photos shown for generic searches are now displayed in the same way as the thumbnails in Image Search. And, for searches which are clearly linked to photos, more image results are shown on the main page as well.
"Drawing from last year’s broader update to Google Images, we’ve integrated many of the features we introduced at that time into our main search results," Grant Dasher, Software Engineer at Google, announced.
"Images will now appear in a tiled layout, with hover previews that give you a larger thumbnail and more information about a particular image," he explained.
Now, for searches where image results are relevant, the thumbnails are shown grouped together, with additional info only shown when hovering over them. This makes it easier to fit larger thumbnail while still displaying a useful number of them.
"Additionally, if we detect that your query has 'high image intent' (meaning, we’re pretty sure you’re looking for images) we’ll start showing more images on the page. If you add words like 'photos', 'pictures', and 'images' to a query, that means you’re probably not looking for a blog post or video," Dasher explained.
A lot of time, users looking for images, especially if they come from a browser search box, will make a generic search for them.
Now, instead of having to do this search and then switch over to the Image Search tab, or even worse start looking through the link results, more images are displayed on the main search engine, making it more likely that users find what they're looking for on that page.