Google Image Search Gets A Face Lift

We noticed the new Google image search being tried out on Google Chrome a little while ago, but Google have now officially launched the new-look image search worldwide; announcing the roll-out on their official blog.

So what’s new in Google images? For a start, it’s far easier on the eye, with a tiled layout that makes it easier to view a large number of images, like this:

There’s an instant scrolling feature, which means you can easily scroll through up to 1,000 images on one page. At first I was complaining that I couldn’t tell which page the results I was looking at were on, but in fact you can tell as there are little numbers in the corner. I just wasn’t looking properly.
If you don’t want to scroll through the images, there’s a keyboard control function which lets you use ‘page up’ and ‘page down’ to skip through the results. Either way though, gone are the days of clicking ‘next page’ and having to wait for another ten results to load.

The previews on the results page are generally larger too, giving you a much clearer set of image results. According to Google they’re ‘designed for modern browsers and high resolution screens’.

The landing pages have also been given a revamp (which they needed, I hated Google image results pages before this), removing the necessary extra click to get to the full size image.

Once you click a returned image result, you’re taken to the full size image, with the website behind the image. You can right-click and save the image, or click anywhere outside of it to view the image in its original context.

Google have also announced they’ll be adding ‘Image Search Ads’ in the near future, allowing advertisers to have sponsored ads with images, tailored specifically for those who are only searching for images. I’m not particularly looking forward to seeing sponsored results on the image search function as well, but as long as they’re unobtrusive and not included along with the genuine results, I guess I can live with it.