As anyone may have noticed, Google changed how it presents image results these days. My jury is still out on this one. But I’m leaning towards a “boo” on the image search effectiveness. I did a search from my computer for a particular name of an executive producer and received 65 rows of image results. But of the 65 rows of approximately 7 to 8 images each, I was stumped at how few images of the actual person showed up.
From the first 5 rows, I had 14 results of what I wanted while the rest of the imagery was merely related to the person in a round-a-bout way. Hence, 14 of approximately 40 images were for what I wanted.
It seems on the cover of this new book of searching for images, that this new methodology of image search from Google is a fail.
In previous renditions of the image search, I’d search for something and get it. Today I search for something and I’m getting pictures of Paris Hilton, obscure art, directly related art, … True Blood ?(not even remotely related)?, anime promo art and the likes. That previous search was without quotes. With quotes, I get 15 images of what I’m looking for (vs. the first result of 14).
On the cover, it does not look like the image search is a very successful makeover, but from a webmaster’s SEO mindset, this can be a boon because you could take a picture of a pile of poop and if some key words are in the descriptor or related to the image and it will come up.
It’s common knowledge that a great chunk of web search traffic from Google is via images. I mean, face it, there’s over 1 billion image searches a day via Google. Why do you think many sites use images? It helps the web SEO thingy that is becoming more prevalent in the outlines of any news writing. In other words, it’s one of those cheat-like tricks to get page hits… like those stupid pagination stunts where a post is split out over a number of pages, making odd, inaccurate page view numbers.
But is this new image function good or bad?
The websites that had the picture of what I was looking for were peppered throughout the results. This means that the websites that showed up in the lower half of the results no longer get the benefit of as much web traffic as those in the first section.
But then there are websites, whose images weren’t even related to my search (directly), who might benefit from the new way that results are demonstrated.
More than likely, these seemingly obscure results won’t get tons of traffic, but now, they are at least represented in the results.
SEO wise, will this dilute results and web page hits sites used to get or will this help?
The one thing I’ve noticed is how Google now frames the website that you go to when you click on an image. I’m sure it’s an experiment for some upcoming function. Me, I get a bit annoyed when I head to a website and it’s framed by some third party function, but it seems to be the social tool trend these days. What am I gonna do? Live with it I guess.
If you’re totally lost about what I’m talking about, then that must mean you are using an older web browser. The Google Image Search feature that they released in mid-July only runs on Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox version 3.0, Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
Here’s the official run down on their new toy, from Google:
* Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
* Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
* Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
* A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
* Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
* Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.
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