Legal Research

Google?s New Image Search

By Simon Fodden

Here’s the paper-thin justification: the law is not always and only framed in words; sometimes images become relevant, even crucial. Accordingly, Slaw, as your premier law blog, feels it a public duty to report on Google’s brand new Image Search function. As described (in words) on the Official Google Blog, there are half a dozen innovations:

Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you?re really looking for.

Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we?ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don?t lose track of where you are.

Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.

A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as ?Similar images.?

Once you click on an image, you?re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it?s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you?re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.

Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It?s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

But there’s much more! In the new sidebar menu, you can, for example, select the colour of the images you want. Thus, red law signs, yellow law signs . . . well, you get the point.

A big improvement, in fact.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 20, 2010 (boomark / email).