A Design Change For Google Images

Jan 24, 2007 at 9:04am ET by Barry Schwartz

Philipp Lenssen reports that Google Images has undergone a design change. The most noticeable changes include:

Removal of row by row light blue background color
Addition of mouse over light blue background color on an image by image basis
Removal of image URL source
Removal of image file size
Removal of image height and width
Mouse over shows the image URL source, file size and height/width details

I have coverage of how SEOs and SEMs feel about this change at the Search Engine Roundtable, as you can imagine, some are not too happy the image source URL does not show until you mouse over the image. I personally like the cleaner interface.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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4 COMMENTS ON A Design Change For Google Images

ableiman, January 24th, 2007 at 10:13 am ET:

The URLs and file sizes provided valuable information at a glance that I now need to comb through methodically. Additionally, I find the design distracting and clunky. The mouse over highlighting works its magic when you are anywhere near a picture, not necessarily on top of a picture, which inadvertently draws attention away from scanning the other pictures.

What are the advantages of this design?

Internet Strategy Blog, January 24th, 2007 at 10:35 am ET:

Oof, I liked seeing image size at a glance.

Maffu, January 25th, 2007 at 3:43 pm ET:

I agree – Google seem to have taken the Microsoft route of taking something that works well and messing around with it until it is broken and annoying. I think it’s dreadfully clunky now.
The information wasn’t in the way in the first place and, when searching using images, that information is very important as a guide – to what sort of site you will be going to, whether that site had more images related to your search, the name of the image (important clues as to search relevance) and what size image you could expect. All of that information could be assimilated at a glance for an entire page of images.
Now, you have to hunt and peck, like a drunken typist and searching by image has been rendered less efficient because of this.
If they wanted to “fix” Google Image Search then they should have worked on what was missing from the functionality, like the ability to dictate how many images are displayed per page, the size of thumbnails etc.
Bad Google, bad.

Internet Strategy Blog, February 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am ET:

Looks like Google has reverted to their previous layout. Yesterday’s search displayed image sizes and source URLs at a glance: http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=cage+cunningham&btnG=Search

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