Victoria is a beautiful tourist destination. The ocean, mountains and forests are key selling features. Now Victoria business websites can better leverage local scenery and images with Google€™s new and greatly improved Google Image search function.
Previously, people looking for images on Google browsed through hundreds of images, looking both at the images and their attached metadata (information about the images).
The new Google Images, which is rolling out the last weeks of January, provides a much better search experience that better showcases images. Instead of a contact sheet of thumbnail images, image results are displayed in an inline panel. This makes it much quicker to review images, quality, dimensions and content.
Give it a try by visiting http://images.google.com/
There are numerous new features, some readily apparent, others, less so:
Drag and drop - Drag and drop an image from the web or your computer into the search box on images.google.com .
Upload an image - On images.google.com , click the camera icon, then select €œUpload an image.€ Select the image you want to use to start your search.
Copy and paste the URL for an image - Found an image on the web you€™re curious about? Right-click the image to copy the URL. On images.google.com , click the camera icon, and €œPaste image URL€Â.
Right-click an image on the web - To search by image even faster, download the Chrome extension or the Firefox extension. With the extension installed, simply right-click an image on the web to search Google with that image.
Detailed image information - detailed information about the image (the metadata) is displayed right underneath the image in the search results, instead of sending users to a separate landing page.
Detail on location of the image - information is displayed next to the image includes the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size. As well, the domain name is now clickable so it is quick and easy to visit the page the image is hosted on. The image iframe overlay is also gone €“ users go right to the page so web metrics accurately record visits and their origins.
Google Image is a great tool tourist destinations such as Victoria B.C. should be using. Resorts, hotels, travel companies must ensure their Victoria website uses the correct metadata on their websites to feed into Google Image. Accurate indexing must start at the web development level.