If you're looking for a particular image of something, Google search is a powerful tool. Sometimes you might be looking for more than just the image itself, though, and that often leads to scrolling through a ton of photos and opening up the ones you hope will lead you to the right content. That can be a laborious task, but Google has just announced a new feature that should lend a hand. It's introducing badges to indicate what content lies behind certain images.

As you can see from the GIF above, searching for a foodstuff such as a 'cupcake' will bring up a number of images of the sweet treat, but what's new is that some have a little badge in the bottom left corner. For this search, there are badges for recipes and videos, and for other queries, there will also be similar identifiers for products and GIFS.

On the Google webmasters blog, Assaf Broitman from the Image Search Team explained the new feature and outlined how to markup recipe, product, and video content on a web page to ensure it gets the correct badge in Image Search. This will happen for GIFs automatically, he said, so no need to worry about those. Broitman also pointed to the Structured Data Testing Tool and Rich Cards report as a way to check page content for errors and give it the best chance of getting the new badges. Take a look at the source for more information on that.

The badges should be coming to the Google app for Android and in browser search imminently, before presumably making their way to other platforms. They're not showing up on any of my devices, but it's likely to be a staged rollout relying on a server side switch, so no reason to panic just yet. Let us know if any of you have spotted them.

Source: The Keyword, Google Webmaster Blog