Today, Google announced and went live with a complete overhaul of image search. We'll provide an overview by using a number of posts from various sources and do our best to provide you with an idea of what others provide.
The news release talks about Google's "similar images" and limiting by color. There are not new features at Google or elsewhere. Bing offers them (look in the left rail) for numerous ways to refine your search and hover over an image to find the similar results link. At Yahoo (click the more filters at the top of the page) also allows you to limit by color (though, not nearly as sophisticated as Google or Bing.) If you want to see possible relates results, click "Also Try...More" and you're given several options including (in some cases) thumbnail images.
We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
Bing offers four layouts (look top right, below the numbers for the options). From what we can tell, there is no way of adding more images to a page by reducing their size.
2. Instant Scrolling
You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
Bing: You can run a non-stop scroll. No page numbers however. This has also been part of Bing Images since the beginning.
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.
That final portion, the landing page and direct to see how it's used on the actual website. Very impressive.
Selecting an image will show you a thumbnail preview at the top and the page where the image was found at the bottom. Along the left rail you'll see other results from your image search. In some cases you can also access the full size image by click the link at the top of a preview page. For example. preview page and full size image.
By the way, if you don't like to hover all of the time, one of the four layout options (the fourth one) let's you see some basic info without having to hover or click.
4. Optimized Keyboard Navigation
For faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.
Bing: We were not able to use them on Bing.
Overall, impressive work by Google and Bing continues to also do an impressive job.
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