Google Launches Streamlined Image Search

Like how Google Image Search works on a tablet? Good news, then. That simplified experience is coming to Google Images on the desktop. Out With The Old Currently, viewing an image through Google Image Search is a multistep process. You do the search, see several images and can hover to get a slightly larger thumbnail: […]

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Like how Google Image Search works on a tablet? Good news, then. That simplified experience is coming to Google Images on the desktop.

Out With The Old

Currently, viewing an image through Google Image Search is a multistep process. You do the search, see several images and can hover to get a slightly larger thumbnail:

nasa earth - Google Image Search

If you want to see a larger version of the image, you have to click on the image, which brings up a bigger version superimposed over the actual web page the image is from:

Google Image Search close-up

In With The New

With the new system that’s coming out today, selecting an image after a search brings up the larger version in a central preview area:

Image.png

This makes it easy to quickly skim through multiple images, rather than the existing system that requires a lot of clicking, then closing windows to go back and select a new image.

Fewer Publisher Visits? Phantom Visits?

The change also suggests that fewer people may visit the actual pages hosting the images, which might be a concern to publishers. Anticipating this, Google’s post about the change says that it has added new ways to reach the image owner’s site that supposedly increase visits:

The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.

When talking to Google about the change, I was also told that by not loading the hosting page, Google is no longer generating “phantom” visits that were a concern to some publishers, one of the biggest complaints Google said it heard from publishers about Google Images.

“That was causing problems for some webmasters, and so we thought we can do away with that. That’s gone now,” said Pierre Far, a webmaster trends analyst with Google. This, along with new options to reach publisher sites, is “a net win for webmasters,” he said.

Of course, publishers who might not feel this is a net win have an easy solution. They can block Google from indexing their images with just two lines in a robots.txt file, as Google covers here.

When do you get the new look? Google says it is rolling out live now worldwide and should be available to everyone over the coming days.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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