Google on Tuesday launched a major redesign of its image search, an effort intended to open a new source of advertising revenue for the Mountain View search giant and parry competition from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Google won’t say what share of its searches are for photos and other images, but says image searches have become one of its most popular search functions, receiving 1 billion page views a day. Bing’s growing traffic for image searches was one area of success Microsoft executives cited last week when they met with the media to mark the first anniversary of Bing’s launch.
The revamp of Google Image Search, the most extensive redesign since the service was launched in 2001, includes new features like an “infinite scroll,” which gives users up to 1,000 images per search page, a “hover pane” that pulls up a larger image and data about the image when users place their cursor over it, and a better landing page that can more easily take users to the Web page where the image is stored.
Google also launched Image Search Ads, a service that allows advertisers to buy space to display images of their related products along with the results of users’ image searches.
“We really think this new interface is the best in the world,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and experience.
“We give you better information about the image on the result page so you can make a better decision about what image you are interested in,” said Ben Ling, director of search products for Google.
The revamped image search, which now indexes more than 10 billion images, launched Tuesday morning and was available to about half of Google users later that day, and expected to be available to everyone else by the end of the week. It will run…