Maybe you're among the few who have seen the changes already; Google Images is getting a facelift this week.
Google announced Tuesday that the familiar landing page for an image search will be changing and the site will offer more sophisticated technology for the 10 billion images it has indexed.
When Google Images was first built in 2001, it had 250 million images. Four years later it was up to 1 billion.
"It’s not just about quantity, though," product manager Nate Smith said in a blog post Tuesday. "Over the past decade we’ve been baking deep computer science into Google Images to make it even faster and easier for you to find precisely the right images. We not only find images for pretty much anything you type in; we can also instantly pull out images of clip art, line drawings, faces and even colors."
The new results page looks similar to Bing's -- just tightly organized images without text. The results page will also use a hover pane with each thumbnail image that will provide larger preview and information about the image.
The changes will be made throughout the week worldwide.
"We hope they (the upgrades) not only make it easier to search for images, but also contribute to a better aesthetic experience," Smith said. "We see images as a major source of inspiration, a way of connecting the world—and their growth is showing no signs of slowing down. We’ll work to make sure Google Images continues to evolve to keep up."
The changes will also include larger thumbnail previews and the ability to view up to 1,000 images on a pages.
Smith said Google will also be launching Image Search Ads, a new ad format, for its advertisers.
