Folks have been noticing for some time that Google Images seems to have been updated, today Google made it official. From the note sent to me by Google PR:
Today, Google announced two new updates to Google Image Search that further help users find the information they need. First, Google Image Search now includes more than 1.1 billion images from around the world. With a comprehensive index of images, users can quickly and easily find relevant images of both popular and obscure queries.
In addition, Google released a new feature that displays images from Google Image Search above Google web search results when they’re relevant to users’ search queries. When users search for queries such as [sunsets], [mountains], [torre eiffel], or [inverno] on the Google homepage, they may see relevant thumbnail images at the top
of their search results marked “Image Results.” When users click on the thumbnail images, they will be directed to the website that contains the original image. Users may also click on the “Image Results” link to see the complete Google Image Search results page for that query.
Also worth noting that Google is now incorporating ar more images into its main SERPs, in some cases. Aaron has a number of examples.
I love Google, have Gmail and blogspot blogs, but I think they could improve Google Images a bit.
Maybe I’m not good at searches. I need to buy Google Hacks or something, some book on it.
During the Iraq elections, I kept typing in “inked finger”, “Iraq elections”, and other terms, but found zero inked finger images and the “Iraq elections” results were all over the place, with lots of irrelevant images.
Is it all my fault…or do others have problems, too? This seems a weak chink in the otherwise superior Google armor.
Ha! I knew something was up. Nice to hear it communicated officially.
So the next question that comes up, and not that I’m complaining, but why is thomashawk.com rated so highly for image searches? Does the fact that I use blogger to publish and Picasa to post photos have anything to do with it? I’d like to think that my photos are genuinely fantastic and that this is why folks are being directed to my site… but somehow I think there is more to it than this.
I do think that photobloggers should rank higher in image searches by the way. In general their photographs are of better quality and more interesting and would probably make better search results than a random text search might.
what work should be done to force images on top of the SERP’s