New Google Image Search Interface: Good for users, very bad for publishers

There is no doubt about the number one rank of Google in search engine market. Still Google is trying to improve it's user interface to display the search results in an easily navigable mode.

 

Google launched its new image search interface of January 24 they described as "faster, more reliable and allows it to talk about the pictures." From the user's standpoint, this is true.It’s quite a radical change and is actually the first major revamp since Google introduced Image Search in 2001.

“Meanwhile, the quantity and variety of images on the web has ballooned since 2001, and images have become one of the most popular types of content people search for. So over the next few days we’re rolling out an update to Google Images to match the scope and beauty of this fast-growing visual web, and to bring to the surface some of the powerful technology behind Images,” Nate Smith, Product Manager, Google Images, announced.

For Webmasters

If you are a webmaster, you have noticed the dramatic fall in image search referral from Google. Like most websites, image search accounts for 66% of our overall traffic. Since rolling out the new image search interface, our image referral traffic has declined a whopping 80%.

The old Google image search interface used iframes and loads a web page, including image results.That was good for image editors, as indicated user's visit and a visit to a page that is important in terms of advertising revenue.

The new design of the landing page is fallen and support Web pages that include image results. In one fell swoop, Google has managed to leech image, deprived of advertising revenue if necessary, while leaving you to pay the bill (the cost of bandwidth) are generated when users see their image on Google gives nothing in return.

What Google says

• We now display detailed information about the image (the metadata) right underneath the image in the search results, instead of redirecting users to a separate landing page. 

• We’re featuring some key information much more prominently next to the image: the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size. 

• The domain name is now click-able, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four click-able targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website. 

• The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view. This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.