Thaindian News

London, July 22 (ANI): Goolge announced changes to its Image Search service, which will show upto 1,000 images per page, and text ads with images on them because for the search engine, a picture is worth more than a thousand words.

“This represents the largest image search engine by far,” BBC quoted Marissa Mayer, vice president of search, as saying.

The search giant revealed the numbers, as it announced a major revamp of its image search.

Some analysts say that the new features are already in use by rival search engine Bing.

There are now over 10 billion pictures on Google image search, which launched in 2001 with 250 million.

“I have been watching image search grow and grow for the last nine years since its launch. This is a tremendous rise and shows how the web overall has gotten richer and richer with all kinds of media,” Mayer added.

Meanwhile, Google has said that the update represented “a nicer way to surf the visual web.”

“We realised that for many searches, the best answer wasn’t text - it was an image or a set of images,” Nate Smith, product manager said.

The report states that 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.

The new look image search is designed to be “more intuitive and get the user to the answer a lot quicker.”

Google can put up to 1000 images on a page to allow the user to scroll through them without having to click in and out of pages. About 10 percent of users can see the new interface at the moment.

Google has also offered new ad format, called image search ads, to advertisers by allowing them to insert an image into their text ads. The new ad format will only appear on Google images for now and are seen as the latest in a series of moves to increase revenue. The new picture-rich ads are expected to sell for a premium over text-only versions.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bertolluci of PC World has accused Google of borrowing some of the new features from Microsoft’s third-place Bing search engine but Mayer denied being influenced by the rival search engine.

“We have taken all our inspiration from our users and looked at how many images they like to look at and how they interact with those results. Our advances are based on studying our users over the years,” she insisted. (ANI)