【2006 Archives】

Google image searching006 Archivesabout to get slightly less annoying. Emphasis on slightly.

The search engine giant announced Tuesday that its iconic image search feature is going to get, well, some new icons to clarify things a bit before you click on an image.

On the search page itself, you'll start seeing small badges on the lower left corner of each result letting you know if they came from shopping pages, recipe websites, or YouTube videos, for example.

Mousing over them will give you more specific information.

Check out Google's example below.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This is pretty handy, if not especially revolutionary. Everyone who regularly looks for pictures on Google has run into a situation where the image they wanted to save was actually a video thumbnail or part of a shopping page that made it slightly harder to click through and save it. Giving users a quick heads-up before they click through is a nice change.

Unfortunately, change often comes at a cost. These new icons will take the place of the image dimensions display that currently shows up when you mouse over a search result. This is what I'm talking about, in case you never noticed that before:

For some reason, Google is relegating that lower-left dimension counter to the view that comes up when you click on a thumbnail. It'd be a little silly to act like adding an extra click to see image dimensions was a major inconvenience, but maybe that could've been moved to the lower right corner of the initial search view.

Either way, you better get used to the new order. Here's hoping the very marginal change to Google image searching doesn't disrupt your daily routine too much.