Remember when Microsoft’s Bing launched and one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the interface of its image search feature? It was unique in that you could simply scroll down on the results page infinitely. You didn’t have to go to multiple pages to find more images. You just kept scrolling. Google is now testing such a feature for its own image search results.
In actuality, this feature was not exactly new to Bing. As Barry Schwartz notes at Search Engine Land, Microsoft had actually already been doing this with Live Search, which became Bing. It’s just that most people didn’t use Live Search, so when they checked out Bing, it might as well have been new. Microsoft has been using the feature since 2006 (and even used similar functionality on its web results at one time), but Google (not to mention the now defunct Amazon A9) also used it – just not in image search. Google’s SearchMash test site, which also launched in 2006 took advantage.
That was a different time though. Now Bing has come out and stole a small, but significant amount of the search industry’s mindshare away from Google, and one feature that people like about it is the infinite scroll in image search. Maybe Google recognizes that people like that and wants to deliver a similar user experience. Keep in mind, the feature is only being tested with a small percentage of Google users though. There’s no guarantee that it will even become a feature.
A spokesperson for Google told Schwartz that they are “continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience,” and that they didn’t have any additional details to share about it. So there’s only room for speculation at this point.
One thing worth noting is that Google has been really geared up about making the web faster. If you go over to Bing’s image search and scroll through some results, I think you’ll quickly find that this method of browsing results is indeed faster than clicking over to multiple pages (although your own Internet connection could affect this).
Will Google implement this kind of functionality eventually? It wouldn’t be the first instance of the search engine including Bing-like features.
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