Oh lookie – Google Images gets a re-vamp

Personally I wouldn’t have known about this if it wasn’t being written about by every single tech blog in the whole tech blogosphere since I am more than happy with Bing Image search for my needs; but appears that Google has decided the time had finally arrived to refresh that part of search.

As you can see from the top image I’m still getting the standard image search results but this is what the new results are suppose to look like once they rollout everywhere.

some of the features we are supposed to expect with the rollout are

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. 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.
• Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
• 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.
• 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.

As well Google will be rolling out a new feature that you will only see when doing images searches. Called Image Search Ads it will allow advertisers to include a thumbnail image along with your lines of ad text.

That should make for some interesting ads once the spammers and other low-life’s catch on.