Bing Redesigns Image Search: Trends, Filters, Suggestions & More

Just a day after a completely redesigned Yahoo Image and Video Search experience came out, Bing has announced their own new Image Search, complete with larger thumbnails, hover-over previews, search filters, search suggestions, and trending searches.

Image searches account for 7 percent of all Bing searches. Now the experience is more immersive, beautiful, and fun, according to the Bing Multimedia Team Program Manager, Jon Noronha.

A small icon depicting three squares of different sizes allows users to find different sizes of any given image. Once on the sizes page, users can hover to see a larger preview as well as the URL where the image is hosted. Choosing a picture and clicking through allows users to preview the entire page it came from (see details below).

Clicking on an image from this page takes users to a second preview pages, with different image sizes arranged in a horizontal bar across the top of the page. A warning box lets users know that selecting an image will take them away from Bing and to the site at which the image is hosted.

Bing Image Search Filters

Users can filter Image Search results by the following parameters:

• Size: All, Small, Medium, Large, Wallpaper (default)
• Color: All, Black & White, Color Only, or choose specific tones
• Type: All, Photograph, Clipart, or Line drawing
• Layout: All, Square, Wide, or Tall
• People: All, Just Faces, or Head & Shoulders

Filters can be combined to drill down to specific image types, and reset, as necessary. SafeSearch controls still appear in the top right and can be used to set Strict or Moderate search safety levels on Image Search.

Other Image Search Page Features

Related searches are suggestions that appear in a vertical right sidebar, as thumbnail images with the query in text beside them. Users can also link to See All Trending Searches (which is also the default view for the Bing.com/Images home page, as seen above) from the bottom of this list.

Below Related Searches, users can view their search history, which can also be cleared or turned off from this area.

At the bottom of the page, users can find links to Privacy & Cookies, Legal, Advertise, About Our Ads, Help, and Feedback, but infinite scrolling means they move down the page too fast to actually catch them and click on them.

The infinite scrolling issue corrects itself once users click through to an image. On the actual image page, users can preview the entire page on which the image is hosted before clicking through, as seen above.

Image Search Latest Component in Bing Redesign

“We hope the new look will entertain, inspire, and inform you about the world,” Naronha wrote in the blog post announcement. “Give it a spin, and then come back to see all the new features,” which seems to indicate more changes are in the works.

The Image Search redesign is the latest is a number of aesthetic changes at Bing. On May 2nd, they launched their new, simplified search results page layout. Shortly after, Bing introduced a new three-column layout, with snapshots and a social sidebar.

The new Image Search didn’t revive Visual Search, which Bing began phasing out last fall.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2186628/Bing-Redesigns-Image-Search-Trends-Filters-Suggestions-More

Introducing Yahoo! Image and Video Search Re-imagined

With the World’s Most Recent and High Quality Photography from Getty Images

Searching for images and video on the Web should be the most visually stunning experience possible. After all, sometimes a photo or video can tell a story better than words.

Today, we are taking Yahoo! Image Search and Video Search to an eye-catching new level. Through an extension of our partnership with Getty Images and some reengineering (and redesigning) of our multimedia search experiences, we are delivering a more timely experience, supported by the most recent, and often never-seen-before content.

That’s right, thanks to Getty Images, Yahoo! Image Search will have access to some of the highest quality digital images on the planet. And these are not just any photos, they are the crème-de-la-crème, from the collection of more than 20,000 new Getty Images added every day by Getty Images’ award-winning network of photographers. Of course we also help people find top quality images of the very latest headline news, sports and entertainment events within minutes of being taken.

Optimizing Your Results – New Image Search and Video Search Results Pages

With this amazing influx of new content, we thought it was only fitting to juice up the entire experience. So we’ve introduced awesome new features to help people take a closer look at the images and videos they want.

• Thumbnail Viewing Experience –Users can now get a fantastic thumbnail viewing experience of images and videos. The new search results page sports a neatly tiled look, with each image and video squarely sized, then becoming larger when you hover over it.
• A New Video Search Results Page, with preview on hover and continuous scroll

The new Video Search results page introduces continuous scroll, and each video equally sized, then becoming larger and playing the preview when you hover over it.

• High Quality Badge & Latest Filter – We have introduced two prominent filters on the left rail to help you find the highest quality and most recent images. For images, the HQ badge identifies photos with at least 2 megapixels and a 1024 x 768 aspect ratio. For Yahoo! HQ videos, we use adaptive streaming technology to optimize your viewing experience by continuously adjusting the quality of the streamed Yahoo! hosted video to match the capabilities of your network and device. The Latest filter allows you to discover the most recent photos and videos available on the Web, so you can always keep up to date.
  
  
  
• Search While You Watch – For those of us interested in a lot of different topics, we now have a “search while you watch” option, to search for a video without going back to the search results page. For users who want to look at interesting video search topics, clearing of the search query on the full image page now shows recommended & trending topics to provide them with an experience of continuous discovery.
  
  
• Full Screen Viewing – Since we have built on the power of the HTML5 browser, we’re now providing a full screen option and cross-device support to help you discover the content you are looking for more easily.
  

Now more than ever, it’s easier to discover the images and video you are looking for on Yahoo!. We could not be more excited about these enhancements, and so is the Getty Images team (check out their post). Give us a try next time you want to find top quality images and video.

Source: http://www.ysearchblog.com/2012/06/20/image-and-video-search/

Google Adding Improvement To Related Image Searches

Google is bringing an improvement to their image search function. Spoiler: It’s a really good improvement.

Peter Linsley, product manager for Google, detailed today on the official Google blog the change coming to image search over the next few weeks.

Linsley reminds everybody about the related search links in blue that dot the top of every image search. If you were too busy trying to find that one hilarious picture of a cat, you may have missed them. Incidentally, they may have helped you find that lolcat faster as the point is to refine your search results with other commonly searched terms.

When clicking on the related search links before, you were stuck not knowing what images may pop up until you reach the next page. The improvement makes that little problem a thing of the past. Whenever you hover your mouse over one of the related search links, a small panel will pop up showing the first few image results from that search.

Linsley uses the example of searching for Greece and then hovering over the related search for Santorini, Greece. This will allow any would be tourists to confirm if that is the search they want without having to go to the actual page.

The improvement should really quicken the pace whenever you’re looking for funny pictures of cats. I know that typing in “lolcats” doesn’t always give you what you may want. With this new feature, it should make it easier to find the very specific “lolcats computer” pictures.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/google-image-search-2012-02

Ranking On Image Search

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2120682/Ranking-On-Image-Search

With over a billion pageviews per day, Google Image Search can be an excellent source of traffic. Of course, one has to ask themselves whether this traffic is beneficial or not and if so, then followup with an understanding of how to get their images to rank.

Why Would You Want To Rank On Image Search?

For some businesses, ranking for their images would mean nothing more than taking on the inconvenience of having to monitor those results for theft. For others it’s a great source of traffic and potential leads. For yourself, the first question to answer is: “is ranking your images beneficial to your bottom line?”

A lawyer for example would likely not want their images ranking for image search. For said lawyer, it is virtually inconceivable that they would attract converting traffic from images however because they have to set an example on copy and content ownership, they would have to take the time to insure that their images aren’t taken. Ranking for images then would produce a net negative ROI as they won’t reap any benefits yet have to expend resources insuring that their images aren’t used elsewhere.

On the other hand, there are many sites/companies who do benefit from ranking their images. A few examples here are:

1. Photographers: While photographers have rightfully complained about having their work taken and used without permission, ranking images is an opportunity to get their craft in from of potential buyers.
2. Image Sales Sites: For sites that sell images it’s obviously beneficial to get those images in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
3. Ad Driven Sites: I learned this lesson from my eldest son who built himself a Pokemon site at 9 years old. After he asked me how he could make it generate money we dropped some AdSense on it. While the vast majority of his traffic came from image search he quickly surpassed the ad revenue generated from the Beanstalk site and attained upwards of 5,000 unique visits per day.

So think to yourself: How can I benefit from image search? What types of image-based phrases would I benefit from rankings for? And of course, how can I monetize those rankings? Once you’ve got these determined, it’s time to get them optimized.

Optimizing Your Images For Rankings

Before we delve into optimizing the images for rankings, let’s first get them optimized for their size (which, one could well argue, will impact their rankings and even the rankings of your site as a whole). There are a variety of easy-to-use tools on the web to help you with this process. You can find a few of the better ones listed by Bryan Eisenberg on the recently updated Website Testing Tools site.

Now that you’ve optimized your images for size, improving their load times and reducing their impact on your server, it’s time to try to get them displayed more often. There are a few core areas that need to be directly optimized, let’s discuss them one by one.

Image Name: After downloading images from your digital camera you’ll likely end up with them alpha-numerically named with little to identify their contents. This would see them uploaded to and references from your hosting environment with location such as http://www.yourdomain.com/images/dsc000043.jpg. All this location would really tell Google is that it’s an image. If you had an image on, say, Google image search you’d do well to place it to that location as http://www.yourdomain.com/images/google-image-search.jpg. With this you’ve described the image and named it in the URL.

Alt Tags: Adding alt tags to your images serves two optimization functions. The first is to associate the image directly with a set of text. The second is to give the engines a set of information to use as quasi-anchor text if the image is used as a link.