Google, the popular search engine, announced today that its expanding image service, Google Images, has hit a new milestone. The service finally has more than one billion page views a day. This is an amazing step and today Google Images is the third most visited web domain online, after the Google home page and the Facebook home page.

There are a number of reasons for this balloon in the number of hits on Google Image. First, it is the most comprehensive source of images on the web. It currently has an estimated ten billion images available, more than any other site on the web, including the famous photo-sharing site Flickr. Also, Google Images has been under ever-expanding pressure from the search engine that Microsoft Corp. launched in 2009, Bing. This search engine has put a large amount of efforts into making an excellent image search function and has forced Google to improve its own image search.

Google has added a number of features that are very similar to Bing features recently, though the company claims to have not been influenced by the Bing innovations. Some of these features are the ability to see up to 1000 images on a page, a thumbnail preview when a user hovers over an image, and the ability to launch a search with an image, getting back both image and text results. One feature that Google plans to roll out soon that is unrelated to Bing innovations is the ability for advertisers to include images in their text ads.

The fact that Google is getting so many more page views is very important. Google makes the lion's share of its revenue off of ads displayed next to search results, at an average of ten cents per ad. At that rate, every single page view counts, and one billion of them count even more. This also shows that, despite the excellent innovations that Bing has been making, it is nowhere near knocking Google off of its pedestal.

More than anything, this simply represents an improvement in the situation that Google already has. The fact that Google continues to gain market share even as competition increases shows how much the Google brand is trusted in the United States and elsewhere in the world. This is no different for Google Image search. Even though there are other companies that have equal or more features, customers are turning to Google for their images.