In the last week of February 2020, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison announced on the official Twitter handle that Google has started the process of updating the Google image search result pages. The update is meant to facilitate information on the content of the image or the type of the image.
Three broad categories of images have been classified – products, recipes, and videos. In the image search result page from now on:
- Images that are about products or product pages will show a specific icon at the bottom left-hand side of the image indicating that the image is a product type.
- Images that are about recipes, there will be an exclusive icon towards the bottom of the image, on the left-hand side. The icon will represent that the content of the image is a recipe.
- Similarly, if the search result is a video, there will be a small-sized icon placed at the lower left-hand side indicating that the content is a video.
Main Features
- By moving the cursor or the mouse on the small icons, users will be able to expand the text and the duration of the video – for example, when the mouse is placed on the icons on the recipe and product image, the text will show ‘recipe’ and ‘product’ respectively; and when the mouse is placed over the icon for the video, it will show the length of the video.
- In order to open the image or the videos, users will now simply need to click on the icon or the thumbnail of the image to start viewing it.
- Coincidently, the icons will be placed right at the position on the image, where earlier the dimension of the image used to be displayed. This means that Google has simply removed the earlier functionality of displaying the dimension of the image and replaced it with the icon feature.
- If users wish to see the dimension or size (length x breadth) of the image, they simply need to click on the thumbnail, – the larger preview of the image will open up. At the bottom left-hand corner where the icon was showing, the dimension of the image will show up.
Further information from Google has also been received about display of licensing information of images. Danny Sullivan took to Twitter to announce that Google is about to start the process of beta testing on a new feature where the licensing information of the image can also be displayed in the image search results.
The particular information related to the license of the image will be obtained from the structured data on a web page. The new feature will add a small badge-shaped icon to the image where the words ‘licensable’ will be mentioned.
When users click on the image to open it up for larger preview, the information on where and how to license the image can be obtained.
Further directions have been passed onto websites administrators on the right way to structure the required data for licensed images.
