As reported on TechCrunch.
by CATHERINE SHU
Google announced that it has revamped its image search to be faster and more effective. The changes, which will be rolled out over the next few days, include image results displayed in an inline panel, allowing users to flip through a set of images by using their keyboard and view metadata without being redirected to a separate landing page.
Here is more information from Google’s announcement on what the upgraded image search means for webmasters:
• We now display detailed information about the image (the metadata) right underneath the image in the search results, instead of redirecting users to a separate landing page.
• We’re featuring some key information much more prominently next to the image: the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size.
• The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.
• The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view. This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.