Product Images Within Google Organic Results?

Google is now testing product images within the free/organic listings. Google has had product images in the AdWords and Google Product Listing Ads for a long time but it is rare to see Google test showing product images within the free listings.

The picture above is from a Moz Help thread, where the user noticed it and asked "Has Google put anything out about this?" Not that I know of.

The listing is actually from an advertiser, and the image matches the product images used in the AdWords PLAs shown above. Do you think Google is using that data, the ad data, to power the image shown in the organic listings? Or is it more of a scheme thing, where Google is testing a new rich snippet?

A Cre8asite Forum thread is debating that right now.

Have you seen product images in the free listings before?

Google's Cutts: Here Is How Google Evaluates New Algorithms

Google's Matt Cutts, depicted here in an April Fools style animated GIF, posted a video on how Google goes about evaluating new search algorithms.

I summarized the three basic steps at Search Engine Land including (1) quality raters metrics, (2) live test metrics and (3) search quality launch team final review. You can watch the full video or read my summary there to learn more.

The interesting part, to me at least, was when he talked about how more clicks on a specific search result set typically means higher quality results except when it comes to webspam. Results with spam typically see a higher click through rate.

So that does make figuring out some algorithm changes harder but Google is pretty good at, according to Matt, figuring out the spam from the good results and they weed those outliers out pretty fast.

Here is the video: