The New Face of Google

Google hosted a press conference yesterday in San Francisco to reveal any progress with their search engine. The spotlight was on Google Image Search’s future and how to better harness the site’s 1 billion daily pageviews.

The site’s image search began with 250 million images indexed back in 2001. Now, the site has 10 billion images to choose from. So, Google faced the obstacle of giving a mini makeover to a well established image search engine. They announced plans to refresh the look of Google Image Search and launch a new search ad option.

The new layout of Google image search shows search results side by side, without any text. When you hover your mouse over the image or click the image, then you will see the dimensions, a description, source data and a link. Under all the citing information, there is a “Similar” link. Click this and Google will bring up tons of similar image search results. The page scroll has also changed slightly, close to an infinite scroll but one where you do reach the bottom eventually. I can’t help but notice that the setup looks very similar to Bing’s image search.

This led Google to incorporating a new ad campaign on the image search results’ page. Just like ads on the normal Web search results’ page, the sponsored ads will be along the top of the screen in a yellow-shaded box with related search results.

After nine years, Google is significantly changing its look and feel. Sure the layout may be more like Bing, but the ads will increase Google’s revenue. The changes are already launched, so go check them out here.