Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine, with the company name even having slipped into current language as a verb. “I’ll Google it!” is an expression that we hear in conversation more and more, and it is no surprise as, for many years, the search engine giant has led the field in innovation and new ideas to help us to find appropriate websites more quickly.

It isn’t just in a text search where Google excel though, as the latest figures that they have released now show. The ability to search for an image is priceless, and with a database of more than ten billion images, Google can boast the largest collection on the internet today.

Google decided to release figures as to the quantity of image searches at the same time that it announced a major update to the functionality of the search itself. The revamp should help users to view the images that they search for in a clearer and nicer way, as the new system is designed to be more intuitive than the current image search.

Some of the new functionality that we can expect to see includes the ability to see up to 1,000 images on one page. You will be able to scroll around these images without having to jump from one page to another and back again. Letting your mouse linger over an image will also inform you of some useful information, such as the website address where the image can be found and the size of the image itself, as well as other useful titbits.

Instead of the traditional Google image search that places all of the results into a neat grid format, the new design has been called a “dense tiled layout”. This should allow you to see more images on the screen at once, as well as additional information as to their size and dimensions at a glance.

Much of the new functionality that will be incorporated into the Google image search is actually already available in Microsoft’s search engine Bing, though Google insist that they aren’t copying but are simply providing users with what they want based on several years of study.

It’s not just the image search that’s received a spruce from Google though, as the many advertisers that utilise this search engine will now be able to incorporate an image into an advert that was formerly limited to text. These image advertisements will, initially at least, only appear in the image search of Google, though it is expected that the new format will eventually become the norm within a web search as well.

Don’t worry about accidentally clicking on an advert when you were just looking for an image though, as Google insists that these sponsored images will be to one side of the page to avoid getting in the way of your usual search, just as adverts appear to the right and above a normal Google text search now.

Whether or not Google truly are being innovative, or have simply adopted the ideas of a rival, will probably never be known. But rather than dwelling on it, let’s simply enjoy the new functionality to be hitting our search engine soon.