Evolution of Image Search Changes Over the Years

Visual search has become one of the most dominating aspects of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The search methodology has the potential to boost e-commerce sales because it is revolutionizing how consumers are going to find out their desired products. Millennials are preferring to search visually, and mega giants like Google, Amazon, Pinterest, Bing, and other search engines are heavily investing in this particular domain. Pinterest CEO, Ben Silbermann, has also once stated that the future of search would be more about pictures instead of keywords. It proves that there’s a strong weight of consumers and brands behind the image search. The phenomenon is a promising factor that coming years will surely be dominated by visual search. Let’s have a look at how image search has evolved and what are the new and advanced ways that are engulfing the virtual spectrum. 

How Is Visual Search Influencing Modern Trends?

The search paradigm is surely shifting from keyword-based search to image and voice search. More than 19% of queries on Google are image-based. Along with that, there are more than 600 million visual searches on Pinterest every month. Additionally, image-based Pinterest advertisements have an 8.5% conversion rate. In 2020, the platform crossed $1 billion in ad revenue. In the same years, the image recognition market witnessed a growth of $25.65 billion. It is being expected that early adopter brands, which are working to optimize their website for visual and voice search, will experience 35% growth in their revenue. Therefore, businesses and brands need to optimize their virtual existence with image and voice search.

How Has Image Search Evolved?

A few years ago, the Google image results differed from what it generates for its users. Previously, there wasn’t any context to the images, making it a difficult and ambiguous chore for the users to navigate when they need something to be done. However, Google has made considerable changes to how it generates results for the end-user. The search engine has started providing additional textual information in the form of snippets to make it easier for the user to navigate. It helps the user in determining which image would be of their more useful depending on their need. Along with that, the mega tech giant company has also introduced structured data, particularly to the image search for recipes, videos, product images, and more. The aforementioned updates have been rolled out in the past couple of years. 

Proven Visual Search Optimization Techniques

It has become highly crucial and critical for webmasters to optimize images to make their way into the Google image search results. It lets them drive additional traffic, which could turn into leads and ultimately sales. Webmasters need to use structured data for video, product images, and other visual stuff. There’s also a need to use descriptive titles and file names. To make your images mobile-friendly, always place images next to text. The webmasters or SEO experts also need to add Alt text to make the image searchable as the search engines aren’t able to determine visual content. 

How to Drive Traffic Using Google Image Search?

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that images are truly the unsung heroes of the traffic generation. Everyone is well-versed that SEO, keywords, and great engaging content drives a considerable chunk of traffic. If there are other ways to drive traffic, then there’s no need to stick with a few ones. There’s no need to go for the same old strategies, over and over again. Google search images could prove to be a great medium of driving traffic to your website. The virtual content is about balancing images and text. It has been argued multiple times that images are an essential part of content marketing strategies. For that reason, there’s no room to right off images from your content. Images need to be optimized, which is the most crucial aspect to land your web pages in the Google image search. If you are already familiar with search engine optimization, then you would have got the point. The optimization of images is more or less similar to optimizing web pages for Google. The ranking of images works the same way as the ranking of web pages. Therefore, the crucial aspect is to add relevant alt text, which could also be your primary or secondary keyword. Whenever a user goes for a visual search query, the visual search lookup works in two ways. Firstly, it recognizes the objects to find similar images and then runs a keyword search query at the backend to find the most relevant web pages that are offering the images’ user is looking for.

Conclusion

The evolution of image search has undoubtedly changed over the years. Advanced algorithms have been developed in accordance with the latest search queries and patterns. Google search image has also advanced itself with new features. Along with that, there are plenty of other reverse image search online utilities that work perfectly fine for the users. Some of them are good at detecting facial features to find similar images, while some work to find similar objects and patterns. Nevertheless, there are online utilities that also work on both ends. Deep learning technology has also been integrated into these algorithms to make them more advanced and for generating accurate results. 

In the last analysis, the image lookup utilities have truly revolutionized the entire web spectrum. Now, a different business can explore more avenues to increase its revenues. Especially, the e-commerce sector can boost their sales by optimizing their images to make their way into the search results. SEO has changed dramatically, and every other day new ways are introduced for making the web space more user-friendly and profitable for businesses. Particularly, image search is one way to evolve and revolutionize the virtual world around us.