Earlier this year, you may recall that Google launched its search options, which allow users to have more customized control over their search results. It includes ways for users to browse results by videos, forums, reviews, etc.

A little over a month ago, a new real time search engine entered the scene. It was called Collecta, and while still in Beta, they have announced some big improvements today.

Today Yahoo introduced a new feature for its image search, which lets users refine searches based on specific locations. In other words, if you search for a place, you will get a menu on the left-hand side of the screen that points you to images of different points of interest from that location.

Since Bing’s launch, the search engine has garnered quite a bit of attention. This is no surprise since Microsoft invested so much money into marketing it. It may still be too early to tell, but it seems to be paying off so far. Bing’s numbers have edged up since its launch.

Today at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami, Google released a new research paper that looks at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. This could lay the groundwork for some interesting advancements in image search.

"To be clear up front, this is a research paper, not a new Google product, but we still think it’s cool," says Jay Yagnik, Head of Computer Vision Research.

It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

Google held its annual stockholders’ meeting yesterday evening and to accompany that Co-founder Sergey Brin decided to re-share the 2008 Founders’ Letter, which was originally published on Google’s Investor Relations site. Brin says they wanted to make this more widely available so they posted it on the Official Google Blog.

Google introduced a newly redesigned version of Google Labs today and a couple of new labs to go along with it. They rebuilt Google Labs from scratch with Google App Engine and moved it to GoogleLabs.com.

Well, Yahoo’s as good as its word.  Two weeks ago, the company showed off some image search improvements and promised more were on the way.  Now it’s announced a thorough overhaul of its image search preview page.

Google has launched a few new features for Insights for Search, which should make the tool even more useful to marketers than it already was. If you are unfamiliar with the tool, it was launched last summer, and it helps marketers find trends in search so they can be applied to your own marketing campaigns. It was discussed fairly extensively here.

Image search is probably not, to be honest, something that the average person uses every day.  For those occasions when you’re looking for just the right pic, though, Yahoo’s introduced a new set of filters that brings its engine roughly up to (and perhaps a bit beyond) the industry standard.

Google has launched new image results pages for Android, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices in the US, the UK, and Japan. With the new results, users can scan up to 20 images on a single results pageand get details for images of interest.

Google is now showing text ads in image searches regularly. This is not the first time people have noticed such ads, but it is probably so for this frequency.

"Since 2005, we have reported signs of Google placing ads on their image search service," notes Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable. "In May 2008, Google said they would run ads on image search and then signs of text ads on image search back in December. But it has really not stuck and people saw the ads on and off."

Much like with email, and obviously search in general (although the market share doesn’t dictate such obviousness), the competition between Google and Yahoo seems to be heated on the image search front as well. Maybe "heated" is the wrong word, but you know what I mean.

You’re probably familiar with Yahoo Search Assist. It’s their version of Google Suggest, even though it came out first (at least as a default feature on the search engine). It suggests search terms as you type in your query. In case you are too lazy to continue typing, you can click on one of the suggestions provided and get to your results.

The Google Docs crew made their first stop on its "Apps to School" tour, on which they stop at colleges across the U.S. and hang out with students, show off how they can use Google Docs for their class assignments, and see how studnets are already using it.  They hung with some students at the University of Southern California. They also announced some new features that should help students do just that.

Google is experimenting with display ads to be placed alongside Google Image results, the company announced today via webcast.

"What we’re announcing today is a new suite of image-related experiments. We’re pairing images with images for the first time–display ads with image search," said Google’s search product management director R.J. Pittman.

Over the past few months, some webmasters have complained that images on their sites were wrongly nabbed by Google Images’ safe search feature. This means, of course, a significant reduction in audience size.

A little bit of nepotism is to be expected.  A lot of it can be annoying, and, in the case of Yahoo’s image search results and Flickr, rather less than helpful.

I once dealt with a stock photo site, and I had a pretty poor experience – its search engine returned either no results or a bunch of useless ones, depending on the query.  The site I visited was not BigStockPhoto.com, but BigStockPhoto’s new search engine nonetheless represents a huge improvement.

[Disclaimer: I'm CEO of Zooomr, we are building both a social based image search system as well as a stock photography platform]