Yahoo! recently overhauled the Yahoo! Image Search Preview page, with the intention of making it more interesting and user friendly for their clients. The result is a more modern feature that looks like a “Web 2.0” image gallery.
Now, when a user clicks on an image, the top bar, which used to look very similar to the Google Image Search preview bar, will instead show a sleek interface on a grey background.
The new preview bar provides a much larger preview of the original image, in addition to smaller thumbnails of 7 other image search results and 5 thumbnails linking to other popular related searches, as shown below.
The old image search page only provided a thumbnail-sized image, accompanied by the name and details regarding the size of the image, in the preview pane.
A search box with search assistance is included in the new preview page, to enable users to quickly search for more images without having to go back to the search results page.
While the addition of the search box is the same as on Google’s updated image search, the image type and colour recognition functionality now provided by Google is not present on Yahoo! Image Search. The latter, however, has a nifty “Recent Images” feature that shows up on certain search terms, and does not include ads with image search results.
These changes certainly make the preview page look good and will likely prompt more searches via the presence of the search box on the preview page, it might, once again, not be quite enough for Yahoo! to score over Google in anything other than SERP aesthetics.
Where it comes to quality of image search results, when tested over a numbers of random, widely varying search queries, Yahoo! does seem to be slightly better than Google at bringing up relevant results. Though Google finds more in terms of quantity, many of Google’s image results are not relevant.
