All the fans of animated GIF images out there are in luck: Google has finally added a filter for GIFs and animated files to its already robust image search engine, the company said today.

GIFs have been popular on the web for quite some time, but Google has caught up. GIFs have taken on a life of their own on mobile devices as well. Vimeo, for example, recently acquired GIF-making application Echograph to help it challenge apps like Twitter’s Vine app and Cinemagram.

To see GIFs when you search images in Google, just go to the drop down box, click “search tools,” click “any type,” and then click “animated.”

Google writes in a Google+ post today:

Even if you’re a fan of animated gifs — say you were the first to email your friends the slow loris very slowly eating a rice ball (goo.gl/KDDX1) — you may not know that the origins of animation go as far back as 1879 and Eadweard Muybridge’s “zoopraxiscope” (see our doodle homage to Muybridge: goo.gl/PGQW3). Gifs have been around since 1987 and have become the de facto standard for short animations on the web, from pony glitter text (goo.gl/iZoEZ) to grumpy cat memes (goo.gl/bC9um).

Starting today, there’s an easier way to unearth those gems: when you do an image search, click on “Search tools” below the search box, then select “Animated” under the “Any type” dropdown box.

We’ve also added a second handy filter: If you’re after the perfect picture of Easter basket clipart (goo.gl/XutAa) but must have one with a transparent background, simply select “Transparent” under the “Any color” dropdown box.

While I couldn’t get Google image search to work for animated files, I assume it will be rolled out to all users some time today. Until then, I’ll just keep staring at cute animal GIFs like the one above.

Dog GIF via wake-up-deadman/Tumblr

In other words, the perfect blend of old Google (fast, reliable) and new Google (usable, pretty).

Old Google image search returned a grid of images, which users could click on to see larger, and click again to go to the originating site. New Google image search will show a large image with detailed metadata and and ribbons of other image results:

Google image search, old and new

The good news for webmasters — and, presumably, owners of photographs and other images — is that Google will now be showing image metadata and the name of the website the image is from right on next to the image, with a link to the originating website. Google says there are now “four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two,” which Google says that in user testing has resulted in more traffic to the original hosting websites.

All of which means that Google is showing greater respect for the owners of images, which is good news.

The new image search is not yet live, so I can’t actually test it. One question that occurs is that while it’s clear that the image-by-image experience is likely better, the new image search might make it harder to quickly scan a large number of images to narrow down a search for a particular file.

One other bit of good news for those of us who like to keep our fingers on the keyboard: Google says that image searchers will be able use their keyboards to quickly flip through images.

Google has modified its popular image search to block many explicit pictures, a move that could be a big win for competing search engines.

While you used to be able to turn SafeSearch off to easily find questionable material, Google now only lets you “filter explicit images” or “report offensive images.” As you can see in the image above, a search for the word “porn” brings up some questionable material but nothing explicit.

Users on Reddit first noticed the changes this morning, and several were quick to label the move as “censorship.” VentureBeat can confirm that common searches in the U.S. and U.K. have blocked steamy images from showing up in image results and that SafeSearch is on permanently.

A Google spokesperson told us and other outlets the following statement about the changes:

We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for — but we aim not to show sexually explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you’re looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting — you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in web search.

Essentially, Google’s decision makes it much harder to find porn using Google. This is a big win for competing search engines, especially Microsoft’s Bing and ICM Registry’s Search.xxx. If Google doesn’t want the traffic, the underdogs certainly will take it.

Microsoft’s Bing, the No. 2 search engine on the web, still offers a robust image search, and we can confirm that it works perfectly well for looking at all kinds of explicit images. (Which is sort of funny considering how Microsoft has serious problems with nudity and pornography being hosted on its servers.)

Search.xxx is another winner. While it does not offer a full-fledged image search, Search.xxx does offer a safe browsing experience when you are looking for adult material. Plus, you know exactly what you’ll find when looking for video or images on it. As we’ve written before, Search.xxx only crawls online pages with the .xxx domain and it claims to be “safer” than using other search engines to find porn because all sites found through it are scanned daily by McAfee.

“We are still digesting exactly what this will mean in real-world search queries for the porn-searching consumer, but this seems to continue a trend we have seen in recent months by the major search engines towards adult content,” ICM Registry CEO Stuart Lawley told us via email. “Google’s decision only serves to reinforce the purpose and usefulness of what ICM Registry has been building: a destination for those adult consumers looking for high quality content.”

Updated 5:11 PM Aug. 30 with a note from Microsoft

Facebook users are adding a stunning 300 million new photos each and every day. So Bing just added a new way to search and browse your friends’ photos without all the clutter of status updates and friend requests.

The new feature is part of Bing’s ongoing evolution to make search more visual. Friends’ photos already show up in search sidebars when relevant, but now interested users can go straight to bing.com/friendsphotos to browse and search all their Facebook friends’ images.

I tried it, and it’s actually better at browsing than searching, but that could be your friends’ fault, not Bing’s. Many Facebook users upload images with little or no metadata, making them difficult to index for search. (Perhaps Bing could license Google’s newest technology for knowing what pictures and video contain.)

Connect Bing to Facebook, and your friends’ photos show up in a Pinterest-like stream:

Search did not work well for me; repeated attempts with “dog,” “baby,” and “beach,” among others, brought up no results. So either I am the biggest loser in the world with no friends, or my friends don’t tag their photos very well:

Update: I received the following note from a Microsoft representative about searching:

I noticed that you had some trouble getting the friends photos search to work. Since this is a new feature, it will take Bing some time to crawl all the photos; but the more you use it, the more photos will surface. Also, you might try searching for your Facebook album titles to see more pictures; and if you’ve recently changed any of your settings, you may also try logging out of Facebook on Bing and logging back in.

What I did find very useful was friend search, which allowed me to view each friend’s photos in a stream, and the default stream of all my friends’ pictures, which is a great way to get visually updated in a hurry on where your friends are and what they’re doing.

But image search? Not a winner yet.

Image credits: Bing

Instant Pages uses web rendering to load webpages from search results 3 to 5 times faster for the average person, according to Google’s Amit Singhal, who reaffirmed the company’s commitment to a faster search experience during the demo.

Singhal explained that the average webpage takes about 5 seconds to load, making the total search experience roughly 30 seconds long, according to the “Query Timeline” infograph used in the demo. That amount of time will probably seem arbitrary for anyone not in charge of improving the world’s most successful web search engine.

The company first made an effort to speed up the search experience with Instant Search, which begins working immediately as a user starts entering words into the search bar (without having to press enter or the “search” button). Instant Pages seeks to do the same with the webpages people are navigating to.

The Instant Pages feature will be available on Google Chrome Beta later this week and is currently available on the developer version of Google’s Chrome browser. Since the code is open-source, Google hopes other browsers will adopt the pre-rendering functionality as a standard.

Google also announced that Instant search functionality is coming for images as well as the ability to search via voice or image from a desktop.

Check out Google’s official demo video for Instant Pages below.