The search giant Google is updating its image search results on both mobile web browser and Android Search app to show 'Similar Items'.
According to Julia E., product manager on Google Image Search, webmasters and web owners need to use schema.org's markup and metadata on their website's pages to make sure that their products are eligible for inclusion on the image results.
This schema also includes an image reference to the available image they want to highlight. They also need to see whether their product's price and currency, and availability metadata are eligible for Similar Items.
Webmasters and web owners can then test their pages with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that the product markup is formatted correctly.
After the markup is properly implemented, they can then see their images on image search by using query site:websitename. It can take about a week or two before Google's crawlers recrawl the website and make the necessary changes.
Similar Items are blocks of images that show up when users search for an image on Google. Showing similar items to the query asked, the images appear in a carousel with price tags and the site where the items are available.
According to Julia E., this feature will allow users to browse through images and find pricing and availability information about products they are interested in more easily than before.
Besides depending on Schema, Google uses machine vision to identify products in images, representing them as shopping links for items that are similar to the ones in the image result. The technology for this machine vision includes Cloud Vision API, which gives developers a way to write applications that are able to understand image content and classify them into different categories.
Among other things, the technology is also capable of finding individual faces and objects within images.
Schema for images was first introduced back in December 2016. But Google never announced it until April 10th, 2017.
Google said that the Similar Items search feature is initially available for "handbags, sunglasses, and shoes and will cover other apparel and home & garden categories in the next few months."