Google recently launched a major redesign of its image search, an effort intended to open a new source of advertising revenue for the Internet search giant and parry competition from Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Google won't say what share of its searches are for photos and other images, but says image searches have become one of its most popular search functions, receiving 1 billion page views a day. Bing's growing traffic for image searches was one area of success Microsoft executives cited last week when they met with the media to mark the first anniversary of Bing's launch.

The revamp of Google Image Search, the most extensive redesign since the service was launched in 2001, includes new features such as an "infinite scroll," which gives users up to 1,000 images per search page, a "hover pane" that pulls up a larger image and data about the image when users place their cursor over it, and a better landing page that can more easily take users to the Web page where the image is stored.

Google also launched Image Search Ads, a service that allows advertisers to buy space to display images of their related products along with the results of users' image searches.

"We really think this new interface is the best in the world," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products and experience.

"We give you better information about the image on the result page so you can make a better decision about what image you are interested in," said Ben Ling, director of search products for Google.

The revamped image search indexes more than 10 billion images. It will run only on newer Web browsers such as Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox version 3.0, Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

Google says image search has become a source of entertainment for people, who scroll through pictures of national parks, exotic beaches or celebrities, or browse paintings, photos or drawings. But another main use is to seek out travel destinations and products, such as photos of European capitals or shoe fashions, and Google hopes to use that behavior as a revenue opportunity by offering the new ad format.

Because those ads feature actual images of a product, Google believes they will generate more advertising revenue than a text ad bundled with a standard search, although executives declined to say how much.

Microsoft executives said recently that Bing's image searches, which already included an infinite scroll feature, were growing at an even faster rate than its general Web search.

Google executives hinted that some of the features included in image search, such as a continuous scroll, could soon find their way to Google's main search function. Now, users must click a link to get succeeding pages of results.