Google is rolling out an update to Google Images. The search engine says it has an index of over 10 billion images.

Published: 26 Jul 2010

Google is rolling out an update to Google Images. The search engine says it has an index of over 10 billion images.

In its refreshed design of Google Images, the company, according to Nate Smith, product manager, Google Images, will offer following features:

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once.
• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting a user getting lost in the images. One can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. Google will show small, unobtrusive page numbers so that one doesn’t lose track.
• 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.
• Optimised keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down.

“For advertisers, we’re launching a new ad format called Image Search Ads. These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text,” added Smith. “These upgrades are rolling out in most of our local interfaces worldwide over the next few days.”