Google On product photographs for net snippets

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there was a way to better control the images that Google displays in web search results for product results. The answer isn’t really, there’s no schema or structured data to help you control or define it for Google, John said. He said Google simply decides for itself whether or not to display them for snippets.

We’ve seen Product images in web results for a long time, sometimes more often than not. Here is an example query on [sofas]:

John added that maybe Google will add a help document to these snippets to make it clearer for the community.

This came at the 10:54 a.m when this question came up:

Ask:

I’m trying to find out more information about the images I’m seeing more and more in organic search results lately, directly in search, not in the image tab because there’s no documentation in Google, in the search center. And I’m trying to figure out some common things about images with some differences, but I don’t see anything related to resolution or size or ranking position. So is this just a test or will there be an upcoming documentation? Do you have any information about these image sections?

Answer:

From our side, it’s essentially just a snippet of sorts, so it’s not based on any specific markup that you do on the pages. It’s not something specific that you define on the pages. It’s really just that we recognize that these images are on these pages, and for whatever reason our algorithms think that users showing some images or something similar would help those snippet images decide on which of the results to click. So that’s kind of like, on our part, yeah, we show pictures and snippets and I don’t think we’ve done that that much in the past, but it’s not based on anything specific that you can control, other than maybe you decide that you don’t want all images on these pages to be indexed and you would like to use the “what’s that not an image index” meta tag. But it’s not something where you can say I want those images indexed or those images shown in the snippet, we’re essentially picking images from the page.

Maybe we should at least document that we show images in the snippet and that you can’t easily control that. That’s a good point.

Here is the video embed:

forum discussion below YouTube community.