Google adds badges to its Image Search results to indicate GIFs, recipes and more

If you’ve searched for something in Google Images on your smartphone recently, be it through the native Google app or through your browser, you might have noticed a small new addition to the results. A small badge will now appear in the lower left of some of the results, marking it as a recipe, product, video, or a GIF image.

The new badges were introduced to further help users in finding what they need on the internet. How many times have you seen a delicious-looking pizza in Google Images and clicked it with the intention to find out how to make it, just to be disappointed by the home page of a pizza parlor in Canada? (No? Just me?)

The new badges are meant to keep you safe from such disappointments and direct you towards the results that really interest you.

However, badges will not be applied automatically by Google, with the exception of the GIF one. In order for the new functionality to work with someone’s website, they have to add special markup in their pages’ code.

Since the new feature doesn’t rely on one central algorithm, but on the individual website owners, it’s likely that it will be somewhat inaccurate at first; many webmasters may ignore the new badges or delay their implementation for whatever reason. It does have the potential to be useful if it gets widely adopted down the road, though.

Do you think this would be a strong addition to Google Image Search? Let us know in the comments.