With more than 10 billion images indexed, Google Image Search has become the visual reference source to beat. Google’s VP Marissa Mayer took the stage at a press conference today to announce the company’s latest image search redesign. In November 2009, ReadWriteWeb covered the introduction of Image Swirl but since then little news has come from the search giant. This morning though, rather than offering up another Swirl-like announcement, the company released a significantly new iteration of its current interface alongside the launch of Google Image Search Ads.
The new ad product allows marketers to place the image of their choice next to their text advertisement. This feature lets product-based vendors offer images of their offerings based on the relevancy of the ad to image search results. So if the user is searching for a specific phone image and specs, it makes sense that commercial offerings for accessories and cases would co-exist in the commercial header.
Apart from the AdWords release, Google’s Image Search redesign offers speed and a higher quantity of images to the user. The new design features a tiled look with the ability to show more than 1,000 photos on a single page. As users hover over the results of their search, the image thumbnail increases and details of that result are displayed. Below are a few photos of the new interface.
The company has rolled out the redesign to 10% of users and will continue to make it available in waves over the next month. To inquire about the image advertisement program, marketers can sign in to their regular AdWords account.
