FRANCOIS SPIES: Hi, good morning.
Welcome, everyone.
My name is Francois Spies.
I'm a product manager on Google images.
So I want to start a little bit different
than the other presentations.
Give you a quick overview of the actual product.
There's some slight nuances to Google images versus web search
that will then lead into the product changes
that we've made recently, and then
talk a bit about optimizing your page within that context.
So virtually users come to image search
not just to find an image.
They actually come to get things done in the real world.
And it's just a way for the brain
to faster process the information when
they're doing a search.
So not exactly sure what they want.
Images scrolling, so the infinite scroll
is a very good way to find something.
Users come for many different use cases, shopping
or to redesign a bedroom, inspiration, to get
some work done.
So there's lots of different use cases.
And we've already changed the product
to reflect these use cases.
So to take an example, someone was
looking for a kids' tire swing.
What you see on the right there is
what the product looked like about two years ago.
It was just images.
There wasn't a lot of context.
And so if you want to try and get something done,
we're just giving you a bunch of images.
It's hard for the user to navigate.
So what we did was a couple of changes to the product.
Firstly, we added text snippets in the domain below the images.
So let's say that now I want to buy a kids' tire swing,
I want to make one, maybe I want an image of one,
maybe I just want to see how to use one,
there's all these different ways.
And it's much easier for the user to navigate.
In the back end, what we also did was we changed from ranking
not just the images-- so OK, these are the most relevant
and beautiful images for the user--
but really, what are the best landing pages,
given what they want to do?
So fundamentally changing the way
that we rank the result to help users really
find the great content behind the image.
It's not about the pixels.
But it's about what's the page behind that.
We've introduced structured metadata.
So products, recipes, videos.
So if you click through to the viewer, what we call the images
viewer, the second click, we will then
surface that information to the user.
And so, in general, it's much easier for the user
to get things done.
So there's some product changes in line with that
that we made in the last three or four months.
I'll just walk through in case anyone
was curious why we did that.
So firstly on the desktop, we hadn't really redesigned it
in about five years.
And we introduced a couple of new things.
Firstly, we moved the viewer to the side panel.
It used to be when you clicked on an image,
the image took over the whole of the screen.
And so the focus of the user was really
on the image and the pixels.
We've moved it to the side.
So what did that allow us to do?
It moves much more clear context with the user.
It's not just about the image.
But it was about the content that's behind it.
We're also surfacing the metadata
and all the published information now for the user.
And so this we've seen is much easier for users
to get things done.
And they're clicking more to the publisher sites.
Similarly to the mobile viewer, we've also modernized that.
We made some aesthetic changes that just made it more clear.
OK, here's the image.
Here is the website where it appears.
Here is the context which it appears.
And we've made a more prominent Visit button.
Again, it's helping our users to indicate to them you're
trying to get something done.
There's a great page behind this image.
Here's all the ways that you can go there.
And again, we've seen a significant increase
in interactions with pages downstreamed from the image.
And then recently for AMP pages, we
call it swipe to visit, which is if your page is AMPed,
there's now a much lower friction method for users
to actually get to the web page.
So there's a little bar, tray bar at the bottom.
You can swipe up and very easily go to the web page.
And that way you can just go back.
And so this is an increase in people going to this
and seeing those web pages, as well as
we've seen a slight increase in AMP adoption for this feature.
So that was a very quick breeze through some
of the product changes.
Let me just get to some of the optimization best practices.
I just have sort of three here.
Firstly, yes, we do support structure data.
Today, specifically [INAUDIBLE] these videos and products.
Each of our viewers will have a slightly different treatment
based on this.
So this is the second click experience.
And it's really great for users to be
able to understand what's the great content behind the image
on the web page.
So we support them for those three categories today.
So in general, it's good to use descriptive titles and captions
in file names to give us a bit more context.
OK, what is this image actually about?
We use some of that information, such as the descriptions
and titles that we surface to the users.
And we've made all these changes for the user.
It's much more clear to them that these are the pixels.
But this is the context with which it appears.
This is the page title.
And so we can tell you, users are
coming to use image search not to find images,
but to find web pages.
So you can help them by optimizing
through these different means.
So that really helped us to surface the right image
for the right query for the users.
And then the last thing is just to use high-quality images.
We want to show our users not just
irrelevant images, but also beautiful, inspirational
content.
And so using that next to text, not just an image by itself,
but within that context really trying to help the user
to get things done.
And then as a standard practice, use mobile-friendly pages.
All of that will lead to better results.
And so lastly, I'm sure you'll know this.
But just to reiterate, in touch console,
you're able to check what traffic you're receiving
from imagery specifically.
There's a way for you to filter that
and to be able to see this standard metric we
see on web search.
So if you aren't doing that today,
you're not optimizing your pages for image search,
I encourage you to do so.
Thank you very much.
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