Bing has introduced a new landing page style for its image search feature. Now when you go to Bing, and click on "images", you will be presented with a page that graphically displays the top 20  current image searches and images that accompany them. 

Bing introduced a handful of new features. The one that will likely catch the most interest is the extension of its recent announcement regarding Facebook. Now, Bing will start showing you which of your Facebook friends have liked search results as they appear in your searches. 

This week Google released its new design for Image Search. The new design includes a tiled layout with instant scrolling between pages. This has already drawn some inevitable comparisons to Bing’s image search, which is particularly interesting given Google’s overall more Bing-like user interface launched earlier this year.

It’s very rare that a major website launches any kind of redesign without any complaints from users. Google is no stranger to this itself, and it should come as no surprise that this week’s launch of the new Google Image Search has come with its own share of complaints (although I’d be surprised if the complaints outweighed the positive opinions).

Google began rolling out a new design for its image search today, and along with that came a new ad format. The format is called (appropriately) Image Search Ads.

If Carol Bartz’s remarks about "pretty search" (made during the Yahoo Investor Day event) left you scratching your head, her company’s acted quickly to clear up the confusion.  Today, Yahoo updated its image and video search homepages so that trending terms are represented with rows of pictures.

Google has launched a new version of Image Search for Android 2.1 devices and iPhone 3.0+. This version provides a slicker user interface that fits in with how users of these devices would browse native images.

Here’s a demo:

Google has introduced a new feature for its mobile Image Search offering. The feature is "Popular Images," and lets Android and iPhone users browse popular images (go figure).

The Popular Images feature comes in the form of a link just under the search box on the Google Image Search page. When clicked, it brings up a categorized list of image searches and corresponding images.

Earlier, we looked at Twitter’s top trending topics of 2009. They broke it down into several top ten lists based on various categories.

Remember when Microsoft’s Bing launched and one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the interface of its image search feature? It was unique in that you could simply scroll down on the results page infinitely. You didn’t have to go to multiple pages to find more images. You just kept scrolling. Google is now testing such a feature for its own image search results.

The PageZoom, NoSquint, and Image Zoom add-ons for Firefox have been downloaded over 5 million times, all together, so obviously, there are a significant number of people for whom default sizes don’t cut it.  And now Google’s trying to help them out by adjusting the way in which it displays image results.

Google has launched a new Labs experiment dealing with image search. The feature is called Image Swirl, and attempts to deliver the user image search results in a different and more visual interface. Google describes Image Swirl:

Google launched a Google Labs project earlier this year called "Similar Images," as an extension to Google Image Search. It allows users to search for images using pictures instead of words. The project has now graduated from Labs and is now a part of Google Images.

Hitwise has released some interesting data regarding photo-searching habits. The concept was conceived of as the firm noticed the popularity of the search "great north run photos".

"This made me curious about the popularity of searches for photos related to big events and news stories," says Hitwise’s Robin Goad.

In a previous article, we discussed why and how to rank in image searches. The article was based on discussion from the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Bing’s Todd Schwartz was part of that discussion, and he has now shared additional insight into Bing’s image search.