The search giant Google offers users various ways to search for media, such as video search, map search, and also their image search feature, which I will be elaborating on today.

Google Image Search is a great way to finding images pertaining to a specific subject or niche around the web and also recently updated their design and functionality to make search for images easier on the end user. The new features that Google has implemented into this feature are listed below.

  • Layout – The visual appearance of Google Image Search has been designed so that you can look at a large variety of images, all at one time, by presenting the images in a tile-style arrangement.
  • Hovering – The information about the image (filename, resolution, location, etc.) has been removed from the actual image SERPs to help reduce clutter. This information can be acquired by hovering your mouse cursor over a specific image.
  • Image Viewing Page – After clicking on an individual image from the image SERPs, the user will then be directed to a landing page from Google where information about the image will appear in the right-hand pane, and the actual site will appear on the left-hand pane. This differs from the original landing page where the information was displayed at the top of the site.

With this new design in place, it has not settled well with the webmaster community. According to an article on WebProNews and on a thread of WebmasterWorld, many webmasters are up in arms about how the Google Image Search results do not take you to the actual page, which means any advertisements that you may have on your site will not be clickable after the first click from Google itself.

You may also notice that Google Image Search‘s new design also bears a similar look and also contains the same features as Bing’s Image Search, such as the hovering and landing page ideas as discussed in my points above.

What are your opinions on the new Google Image Search? Is Google heading in the right direction, or has it become harder to get the images that you want from the web? Please be sure to leave your feedback regarding Google Image Search in our comments section below.