Two pieces of cutlery, the arrow of play, a label and more: for a few weeks now, the images that appear in the US version of Google Images from desktop show these curious icons in the left corner, where there was (and here in Italy still is, at times) the indication of the dimensions.This is the new feature introduced by the search engine, which immediately informs the typology of the page that published the resource.
Google Images, here it comes the icons to qualify the site
To give news beforehand of this modification has been the twitter profile Google Search liaison, with a series of posts (and screeshots, brought back here on the page) in which they synthesize the operation launched by Big G’s technicians: users of google image search from desktop will be able to see new icons providing useful information and indicating whether the image leads to a page with products for sale, recipes or video content.
Hovering with the mouse over the icon, the box expands and displays other details, such as a descriptive text (Recipe or Product, in particular) and the length of the video.
Removed the sizes of the thumbnail
As part of the change – tweets tell us again – the box that reports the size of the image that currently appears when the mouse hovers over the resource preview in Google Images will be removed.To get the information on the measurements we will have to go with the mouse on the preview of the selected image (after having therefore chosen and clicked one of the proposed thumbnails).
The value of the new icons
The new icons allow you to provide immediate information to users using Google Images, who can immediately know if the resource that hit their focus is placed in a transactional context, refer to a recipe or if instead it is a fragment of a video.This simplifies the search and speeds up the user journey: all it takes is to read the label to find out if that product is for sale (and be immediately connected to the eCommerce where you can buy it) or if that dish is replicable at home following the instructions.
Structured data of images
Google has not yet reported how it will collect information from sites for their use in Images, but everything suggests even more intensive use of structured data (and, in fact, the shown examples of Recipes, Products and Videos all refer to known markups already used today).
However, Danny Sullivan also took the occasion to recall that the company has launched in beta testing another marking dedicated to multimedia resources, which allows you to enter metadata license information and to bring up a badge with the writing licensable.As the company’s official page explains, this feature tells users that information about the image license is available and provides a link to the site owner of the rights in the Image viewer (the area that is activated after clicking on the thumbnail).
