Google Images may soon feature "shoppable ads"

[Karlston]

Google Images is a popular image search engine that returns images based on search terms that you enter into the search box on the site.

 

Advertisement may be displayed on Google Images depending on the search query and region of the searcher.

 

Google announced recently that it plans to extend advertising on Google Images by introducing what it calls "shoppable ads" to the supported ad formats.

 

The basic idea behind the new ad format is that advertisers may use it to highlight multiple items in a single image that are up for sale. Think of an interactive image that lets you interact with certain elements in it.

 

 

A home office ideas advertisement might show an image of a home office. Upon user interaction with the element, it might highlight the desk and a bookshelf on the image, and display prices for each of the items.

Let’s say a shopper is searching for home office ideas on her mobile device or desktop and goes to Google Images to explore ideas around how to organize her room. She can scroll through the images, hover over any sponsored ad with the price tag, and see the items for sale in the image -- along with prices, the brand, and more.

Google notes that it is testing the format currently "on a small percentage of traffic with select retailers" and on certain broad queries currently. The company plans to roll out the new ad format to more categories in the coming months.

 

Google Images will feature Showcase Shopping ads as well soon. The ad unit is also available on Google Search and provides advertisers with options to highlight products or their brand at the top of the search results.

 

The new ad formats will show up on mobile and desktop searches on Google Images.

Google Images alternatives

Using an ad-blocker may block the ads from showing up on Google Images. You may also use a different image search engine that uses less or even no ads at all.

 

Google has been criticized recently for removing the View Image button in image search. While you can restore it using extensions, you may also use different search engines altogether.

 

Here is a short list of image search engines that you may want to try out:

• DuckDuckGo Images Search -- supports size, type, layout, and colour filters. DuckDuckGo supports bangs that you may use to redirect searches to certain image search engines (and others) automatically.
• Startpage Image Search -- works similarly to Google Images. Supports size, colour, and type filters. Check out these Startpage search tips to get you started.

 

Source: Google Images may soon feature "shoppable ads" (gHacks - Martin Brinkmann)

[DKT27]

I did not think I will say this. Thanks, hate it.

 

I hope all the top search engines out there understand that on mobiles, searching for images, at least hundreds of them, is quite heavy, adding those things additionally to them is only going to increase their load in it.