Update: Google has a posted to its blog on the subject and a video embedded below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JwhDjYbE6s&w=600&h=370]

Notes:

– Google Images does 1 billion pageviews a day (impressive!)

– Many unexpected uses like “how to build a treehouse”  or pulling line art to make coloring books.

– Ben Ling:  Numbers: 2001 (launch) 250 million photos. 2005: 1 billion images. today: 10 billion

– With the new interface, you can now get 1000 images on a single search result page.

– Now there will be ads on Google Images -(Add 1 billion more places Google will have ads – $$$$$ – and now you know what Ling was up to )

-Here’s an incredible capability  from the Blog post:

There’s even more sophisticated computer vision technology powering our “Similar images” tool. For example, did you know there are nine subspecies of leopards, each with a distinct pattern of spots? Google Images can recognize the difference, returning just leopards of a particular subspecies. It can tell you the name of the subspecies in a particular image—even if that image isn’t labeled—because other similar leopard images on the web are labeled with that subspecies’s name.

– You can now do geo-searching and time searches on images based on metadata (this will be very cool!).

– 10% of users are getting new version now.  By end of week, everyone should get it (scaling out).

That’s all for now (http://images.google.com is still old for me – for you?)

I’ll be looking for a blog post or special announcement and update this page when it becomes available.