Date of Recent Image search improvement

[speedshopping]

Hi everyone,

In light of Google's comms on [insidesearch.blogspot.com...] can anyone shed any light as to what date this happened?

Improved image search quality. [launch codename "endearo", project codename "Image Search"] This is a small improvement to our image search ranking algorithm. In particular, this change helps images with high-quality landing pages rank higher in our image search results.

And how do people interpret the improvement? My take on it is that if you are doing poorly in search, then your images will now do equally as poorly! We are trying to determine whether this may be a reason for our January 19/20 decline (and not the ad algo release)

Thanks,
Wesiwyg

[edited by: tedster at 6:20 pm (utc) on Feb 6, 2012]
[edit reason] added a quotation box [/edit]

[tedster]

Yes, it does sound like indexing the other content of the page can now help with rankings in image search. That might spell problems for photography galleries with little to no text content.

In terms of the exact roll-out date, I don't watch image traffic closely enough to have an opinion. There are members here who do, however. I hope some of them can weigh in.