Google Image Search Lets You Find More Sizes for an Image

Google Image Search added a feature launched by Bing in March: showing more sizes for each result. If you mouse over an image, there's a new option called "more sizes" that lets you find out other versions of the same image. This is useful if you want to find the higher-quality version of an image or if you want to list all the sites that include a certain image.

Most likely, Google uses the same technology that lets you to find similar images, but restricts the results to images that are almost identical if you ignore the resolution or some minor editing.

A similar service is TinEye, a search engine that finds the different versions of an image you upload. "TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version."

Google Image Search Bugs

The most significant Google image search redesign now with many useful features and a lot of bugs.

If you type a query in the Google Image Search, click on the search button, scroll the page, click on the Google logo, type another query and select the "images" option, Google scrolls to a random part of the page. For example, it would scroll to the page 57.


Another issue is that Google's large thumbnails for the PNG files are sometimes pixelated JPEGs.


Clicking on the "more" link in the Google's sidebar refreshes the page and doesn't show additional Google services. When you go back to the results page after clicking on the results, you need to wait until the Google scrolls to the right position and some of the images are loaded again. Scroll the results page, resize the browser's window and then you'll notice that Google readjusts the images and jumps to the top of the page.

The new interface has too many bugs and should have been tested more thoroughly before being then released. Google offers an option to switch to the previous version at the bottom of the page, but it's not very persistent.

Google Tests New Image Search Interface

The unofficial blog google.org.cn reports that the Google tests a new interface for the Image Search. The experimental interface uses bigger thumbnails and no longer shows the information about images. To find useful information like the size of the image or the domain that links to the image, you need to mouse the over image.

Google's new UI is very similar to the Bing Image Search's interface. It's not the first time when Google tries to hide the image details. In 2007, Google launched an image search interface that only displayed the information about a result when you hovered over an image, but a lot of users complained and the old interface has been brought to back.