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Google Playing Copy-Cat to Bing

Mike Moran — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:01:25 +0000

If you have been paying attention to what Google has been doing as of late to improve its user experience, you might be noticing something strange. It seems that almost every time that Google makes an improvement in its aesthetic appeal, it looks more and more like Bing. Remember the short-lived attempt to customize the Google home page recently which has since been removed?

Take the latest change to hit the search engine, which is its presentation of image search results. Here is the old look for Google image search results:

Here is the new look:

You also no longer have to click through pages of results as they are now all on one page, although page numbers are assigned to show page breaks.

Now here’s Bing’s image search. A little more white space in Bing, but essentially the same look and feel:

In addition, Google is copying Bing’s use of a mouse-over expansion of each image to give some details about the image.

All in all, I just find it interesting that while Google is the far superior engine in market share AND results, it is playing catch-up with Bing in how it presents itself. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem like a hat-tip from Google to Microsoft, which is just not natural.

What’s your take?

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Google Image Search Meeting Image Ads

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:51:43 +0000

Display advertising, where Google does not shine as brightly as it does in search ads, could be coming to the image searching side of the site.

Google may not plan to have ads on its signature home page, but everything else appears to be fair game.

Marissa Mayer told Bloomberg Radio that Google thinks matching graphical-display ads with image searches "represents a large opportunity, and there’s lot of potential for advertising revenue there."

"We haven’t found a proper way to monetize image search to date," Mayer said in the report. "You may see us roll out an ads-image search in the future, but when we do you’ll know that’s because we found a way that ultimately enhances user happiness with the product."

We’re not certain how happy ads will make people who are only looking for the latest celebrity photos in image search, though we see an obvious tie-in for media companies and their top-tier commercial backers with image search display advertising.

Sponsors of the new Indiana Jones movie coming out on May 22nd, for example, would want placement in image search as people look for photos of Harrison Ford and his co-stars. The interest the summer blockbuster season could generate offers a solid motivation for Google to do their display ads sooner rather than later, though we don’t really expect to see them very soon.

However, flagging text ad clicks may push Google to move faster on display ads against their image search. They don’t want to wait until clicks become completely flat before starting such an initiative.

Google Sheds More Light On VisualRank

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:46:39 +0000

Researchers for Google recently presented a paper on applying the company’s PageRank technology to the world of product image search.

Without appended metadata, search engines can’t truly see images. Plenty of work continues in the field, as unlocking a truly effective image search should be a profitable discovery.

On the official Google Research blog, presenting researchers Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing discussed some of the theory behind their paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search.” The main point: you can’t play with it yet, but if you’re qualified Google might hire you to help build it.

Popularity of product searches made that an ideal candidate for research into image search, the researchers noted. “Since the publication of the paper, we’ve also extended our results to other query types, including travel-related queries,” they said.

As they mentioned in April, VisualRank poses a massive computational demand. Right now, there isn’t going to be a massive all-encompassing index of images.

The researchers hope to build relevant subsets of product images, and use these to drive the results people see. In this latest post, they hinted “we have an approach that has an easy integration with both text and visual clues.” More on that in coming months.

Photoshop Express Drives Online

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:41:46 +0000

Adobe released its latest rich Internet application, an online version of its signature image manipulation program, Photoshop.

Dubbed Photoshop Express, the service may have sounded a death knell for competing online image products. Adobe has years of branding and thousands of designers weaned on their desktop Photoshop software; the term “photoshop” has come to mean image manipulation.

Those factors will be in play as Adobe seeks users for the new service. To bring them in, Adobe offers 2GB of image storage, tie-ins to social networking sites Facebook and MySpace, and a price tag of free,

Adobe Photoshop senior product manager John Nack said there will be a paid service, with added functionality. Also, Adobe plans an AIR version of Photoshop Express, which will allow offline image editing.

Adobe’s Terry White summarized the feature set the new Photoshop Express available to its users:

Once you set up your account, you

French Girls Find ‘Appiness On Google Maps

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:44:31 +0000

That it’s near the corner of Cedar and Shaft doesn’t help, and that Google Maps picked it up makes it a legendary prank. And if aliens happened to be flying over Hazelton, Pennsylvania around the same time the aerial photograph was taken, this is what they saw.

A one hundred and fifty foot penis.

And you wonder why the aliens rarely stop.

Google reportedly grabbed the image from Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, who took the aerial photograph in 2005. And apparently it will stay that way until the Department updates, sometime in 2009.

Here’s what happened:

Pranksters in 2004 used weed killer to etch the giant phallus into the turf of Harman-Geist Memorial Field, located in northeastern Pennsylvania. Short of sod, it would seem, the Hazelton Area School District used green paint to cover up the prank. But by the time the DCNR rolled around to survey the area, the paint had washed away.

Frank Victor, superintendent of the Hazleton Area School, upon hearing the prank is now visible from Google Maps, had no comment. "Really, what’s there to say?" he tells Hazelton’s Standard-Speaker.

The news is making the rounds in the forums, with the simple command: Go to Google Maps and enter N Cedar St & Shaft Rd Hazleton, PA 18201.

Google Chart API Released

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:12:23 +0000

Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API. Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, e.g. (line break added)

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:90,49&chs=350x150&chl=Foo|Bar

… and Google returns a PNG graphic containing the chart. For instance, above URL results in the following image:

Splitting up the image URL parameters, you can see what it’s made up of:

cht=p3
the chart type, in this case, a pie chart

chd=t:90,49
the chart values, text-encoded, and separated by a comma

chs=350x150
the custom chart size, 350×150 pixels

chl=Foo|Bar
the different labels for the pie chart sections, separate via the pipe character

I’m not linking live to Google but caching this image on my server instead, just in case, as Google limits your requests to this API to 50,000 per day. Even with that limit, you can grab the image and do the caching on your own server automatically (by copying the binary), which would mean 50,000 requests will be good enough for many use cases.

This service is really neat all in all. The last time I wanted to do a dynamic 3D pie chart as above, I used some PHP scripts (accessing the GD image library) which were ugly to configure, and not just because the code was obfuscated to make it hard to remove "created by" messages in the image. Then again I’m not sure the Google Charts API does everything other services can do, and we also don’t know how long they will keep up support for it – think of other half-cancelled APIs like the Google SOAP API (and there doesn’t seem to be a quick way for Google to make money from the Google Chart API yet… adding ads would be too noisy for users for this purpose, and there’s no way to make the ad clickable anyway).

Here are couple of more examples of what can be done with the Chart API (cached again, but click them to see a live parametrized version):

Also see how you can kidnap Google Page Creator’s image generator.

[Via Google Code blog. Thanks Reto!]

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Digg Adds Images Category

Andy Beal — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:30:34 +0000

It seems like Digg users have been asking for–and Kevin Rose promising–a category for images and photos forever. Well the long wait is now over and you can finally uploaded your favorite lolcats image.

At the Digg blog, Kevin Rose announces the launch of image support and also better organization of existing categories. Here’s what Digg users are waking up to today:

New Universal Taxonomy
Now you can submit news, images, or videos to any category on Digg! Categories will be consistent across the board, which means you can view all media types in a given topic, or view one media type at a time (e.g., only images under the “sports” category). We’re also excited to support the launch with new categories. “Offbeat” will be its own category, with new topics, and we’re adding a whole new “Lifestyle” category with topics like Autos, Food & Drink, and Travel.

New Images Crawler
Submitting images to Digg is basically the same as submitting news and videos, with a few notable differences. When you submit a link to a web page containing multiple images, Digg will crawl the page and present up to ten image thumbnails from that page for you to choose the one you want. We’ve also added this technology to news submissions.

Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
We’ve added a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we’ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

I tried testing it out with a funny comic strip image. So far, it’s showing zero diggs–I didn’t know that was possible-and the thumbnail is not showing up. Hopefully that’s just a glitch.

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Digg Scoops Up Images, Tweaks Categories

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:02:29 +0000

It took a while but Digg finally has an images category available for contributions and sharing with other Diggers.

Digg became more photogenic as the social media site finally tucked an image-dedicated section into the site. Kevin Rose tipped Intel as the sponsor for the Images section in his Digg the Blog post.

Submitting an image works as it does for stories and videos, but with a couple of differences. First, when suggesting a picture from a page full of images, Digg’s crawler looks at the page and presents up to ten images from it.

The submitter then selects the image from those thumbnails and continues the process. To help limit duplicate image submissions, Digg will integrate technology from Id

Google Image Search Gets Closer To Picasa

Doug Caverly — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:14:42 +0000

On Picasa’s homepage, a slogan proclaims, “Fast and easy photo sharing from Google.” The exchange now seems to work in the other direction, as well, since Picasa results have been integrated into Google Image Search.

Or so we’re told. When searching for vague terms like “dog” and “mountain,” the first page of Google’s results gave me nothing from Picasa. Even when searching for semi-specific photo titles from Picasa, such as “million paws walk” and “ikoma mountain,” nothing came up.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing – Yahoo’s integration with Flickr was more than a little in-your-face. And Ionut Alex Chitu (who also covered the Yahoo-Flickr story) has proof of this new mixing in the form of a screenshot (a Google Image Search query for “caleb 2 months old” turns up something from Picasa).

Still, even when Picasa images show up, they’re not entirely helpful; it turns out that a Picasa sign-in is needed to see some of the results in their largest form. This almost seems like an oversight, so hopefully Google will get about the business of correcting it.

For the time being, we’ll put this one in the “good try” category.

Microsoft JPEG XR Approved As New Image Standard

Nathan Weinberg — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:20:08 +0000

Joint Photographic Experts Group, which owns the JPEG standard, has voted to make Microsoft’s HD Photo their new standard, under the name JPEG XR.

Once the process is done (it takes about a year), JPEG XR will be the new version of JPEG, with newer software and operating systems, plus top cameras (and, if we’re lucky, all cameras) supporting the format. Adobe likes the format, and cameras supporting it are supposed to hit in the middle of next year.

Why should you like JPEG XR? Because right now, most cameras offer either RAW or JPEG. RAW changes from camera manufacturer to manufacturer, so you can’t just share the files, and JPEG is an aging standard that doesn’t have the greatest quality in the world (though it still looks damn good at high quality levels). JPEG XR will bring JPEG closer to the level of RAW, but should still work with all computers and software, making it more shareable and widely supported, while looking a whole lot better.

Microsoft may have invented the standard, but it isn’t controlling it. The standard belongs to the world. They just hope you remember, if you fall in love with the new standard, that they did something really good for the photography world here. Give ‘em some credit, kay?

Previous posts:
Microsoft Taking On JPEG; About Damn Time! – May 25, 2006
Microsoft To Make HD Photo A Standard – March 16, 2007
HD Photo Becomes JPEG XR – August 8
HD Photo Plugin For Photoshop Released For Mac OS – August 23
Microsoft Pro Photo Downloads – Get Em! – August 27

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cht=p3	the chart type, in this case, a pie chart
chd=t:90,49	the chart values, text-encoded, and separated by a comma
chs=350x150	the custom chart size, 350×150 pixels
chl=Foo\|Bar	the different labels for the pie chart sections, separate via the pipe character