For example, the picture I took of Danny Sullivan with (former Microsoft’s) Kevin Johnson at a past SMX conference was a nice photo of Danny to tag. I click on the “add person” link on the right side of the page and begin entering in Danny’s name. Since Danny is a contact of mine in Facebook, I can easily add him as a person on this photo.

You then click on the little square on the right side of Danny’s name, which brings up a box on the photo. You then resize the box and place the box around Danny’s face. I believe as soon as I set this, Danny would get a notification that he has been tagged.

Then I tried to add Kevin Johnson, who is not a contact of mine on Flickr, which gave me this option:

If you tag a private photo, that person you tag on that photo will have access to see the picture, no matter what privacy options you have set. For more details, see the links below:

Who can add you to a photo: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/photospeople/

Who can add people to your photos: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/photoprivacy/

To find out how to remove someone from your photos, check out the FAQs: http://www.flickr.com/help/people/

Here is a walk through, screen by screen.

The app icon is plain and simple:

When you load up the app and past the start screen, images are displayed on the front page. But the images has slow motion to them, as they pane in and out between other images. If you are logged in, you get images from your friends as well. Here is a screen cap of that page:

From here, you have several icons and buttons you can click on. The most prominent is the search box at the top. I will explore each of the features below.

Here are the search options, including the ability to search “all uploads,” “from your contacts,” and “your photostream.” There is no auto-complete, plus, even though it does ask for your location, it does not give you the option of seeing photos in your location:

Here are the search results:

The “recent” button takes me to see recent “activity” or “uploads.” Here is a screen shot of my recent activity, showing recent comments left on my photos and recent favorites by others on my photos:

Here is a look at the recent “uploads” from my account:

The “You” button shows me my most recent pictures on Flickr:

Clicking on the top right icon will change the view from thumbnails to list view:

When you click on an image, you can see the image picture in larger format, more details about the photo, plus you can email it, skip forward or backwards or comment on the photo. Plus you can click on the image or click on the image tags:

Here is the comment form:

Here is that same image in the larger image viewer:

Here is a look at the tag search results:

To add a picture, click on the camera icon at the top right and you are given these options:

The “i” button takes you to learn more about the app, privacy policies and also gives you the option to login or log out at the top left of this screen:

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is. SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities. Here’s a screenshot of a search for “anaheim real estate” in Anaheim, even though I’m up in Washington state.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

In the example above, I’m doing a search for the rock band U2, and I’m searching French-language results on the French versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I’m also including local newspapers, too. The search results page has a tab for web results and a tab for news results. The web results page, like any good meta search site, tells you where each listing was found, i.e., “Ranked 1 by Google search” or “Ranked 4 by Yahoo search.”

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

See also:

• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

I love Searchme as a “recall engine,” using it to find web pages or sites that I’ve previously visited but can’t remember the site name or URL. The visual display of results, with the ability to quickly scroll through mini-versions of pages makes it easy to recognize sites that I’ve already seen.

I also love Searchme’s music search capabilities. Through an arrangement with iMeem, you can play entire songs, directly from the music search result page. It’s a great way to decide whether you want to buy a song from iTunes or Amazon (both of which only let you hear 30 second snippets of songs).

Searchme also offers a sort of “visual bookmarks” feature called “stacks” that let you save pointers to content you want to revisit.

Searchme likely won’t replace your regular search engine, but it offers enough really cool and useful features that you’ll want to add it to your web search arsenal.

Here’s a look at the two announcements:

Flickr’s “Mobile Makeover”

With visits to Flickr’s mobile site (m.flickr.com) up more than 50% in the past year, the mobile site now shares much of the same features and functionality that Flickr users are familiar with on the main site.

The Yahoo announcement trumpets the new video playback capabilities on Flickr mobile, but many users will be happier with the improved navigation. Your user home page (below left) sports quick links to see recent activity on your own photos, photos from your contacts, and the most interesting photos uploaded to Flickr. An individual photo page (below right) shows thumbnails of the adjacent photos in your account; a single tap navigates to that photo.

The video playback feature is available already for iPhone and iPod Touch users, and will be rolled out in the coming weeks for other devices that support streaming video.

For more, read Yahoo’s full announcement.

Google’s Picasa Upgrades

Google’s Picasa service is getting several upgrades:

• Sharing – Picasa users can now more easily see who they’ve shared photo albums with, and others can more easily see all the albums you’ve shared with them.
• “Sign-in required” albums – In addition to labeling photo albums as public or unlisted, a new option is “sign-in required.” This lets users share albums only with others who have a Picasa Web Albums account.
• Video playback – All videos that are 320 pixels or bigger will play back in higher-quality MPEG4 format.
• International name tags – The name tags tool is now available in 38 different languages.
• Automatic comment translation
• Improved gallery page design

For more, read the full announcement.

For example, I conducted an image search for myself, [barry schwartz], I then located a picture of myself. I hovered over the picture and selected “show similar images,” which took me to this result set. I can see how Live Search felt those images are similar. Most the results are with blue shirts, most are of faces of people and so on. Here is a picture of where to find the “show similar images” link:

I then tried a search for red flower and showing similar images for the first result, is much easier for Live Search to obtain.

I believe there are image search engines where you can upload a picture and it would search for related pictures across the web. It would be nice to see Live Search expand this feature to enable users uploading pictures. But this is pretty neat.

It got us thinking about non-Google search tools that might have slipped notice altogether, or just fallen off your radar. With that in mind, here’s a list of seven search tools you may not know about … but should.

Read on to discover about how to see search suggestions from all major search engines on one page; a “cover flow” interface to see face images from Google Images; a new way to get recommendations about music, movies and more; new tools to search multiple search engines from one place; a tool for finding hot event tickets and as assist for hunting through Flickr’s many photos.

Soovle

Soovle offers a unique search interface that puts a variety of search sites on a single page. But what makes it unique is that, as you type in the search box, Soovle shows you the auto-completion phrases that each search site recommends. In addition to being original, that function could serve to help with a keyword research project. It looks like this:

Google is the default search site when you arrive, but you can use the right-arrow on your keyboard to quickly select a different site to perform your search. And there’s also a daily update on the top auto-complete terms. Each day, Soovle queries the search sites to find out what they show as the top results for each letter of the alphabet. Pretty cool stuff.

facesaerch

If you like the “cover flow” feature that Apple iTunes offers, you’ll like this new image search engine. facesaerch (yes, “a” before “e”) takes a Google image search, eliminates everything but faces, and gives the results a more modern interface. It looks like this:

It’s nothing groundbreaking overall, but one nice addition is a customizable widget that lets you embed a facesaerch widget on your blog or web page, complete with cool thumbnail scrolling and all. (For your Oprah Winfrey fan page, of course.)

TasteKid

TasteKid is more of a recommendation engine than a search engine. It covers movies, music, and books, offering suggestions for things you might like based on what you search for. The interface is gorgeous (albeit a bit dark/goth), and the recommendations are generally good. Search for U2, for example, and TasteKid suggests you try out INXS, R.E.M., Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, and several other artists — most of which fit what a typical U2 fan might enjoy.

There are question marks next to each recommendation. When you mouseover a question mark, TasteKid displays additional information from Wikipedia, YouTube, and Amazon about that artist (or book, movie, actor, etc.). It uses Google Gadgets to offer a widget that can be embedded into your web page or blog.

fasteagle

Fasteagle is a combination search tool and web directory rolled into one interface, with a little touch of feed reader built in, too. The home page gives you quick access to search a dozen different sites, from Google to Delicious to eBay to FriendFeed.

It would be nice to be able to customize those 12 options, or add more to the original 12 to make your own personal search portal. But I don’t see that option anywhere on fasteagle, which is still in beta. Meanwhile, clicking on the categories in the top menu (Tools, News, Business, etc.) leads to new sets of sub-categories in the left-side menu. Under the Tech category, for example, the left menu changes to show sub-categories such as Web World, Tech Vloggers, IT News, Computing, Apple, Google, Mobile Computing, and Web Marketing. That last sub-category includes sites like Search Engine Land, Marketing Pilgrim, Search Engine Watch, and several others. Click on any link, and the site shows up in the main fasteagle window, with the top and side menus still showing — making fasteagle almost like a feed reader that gives you quick access to hundreds of web sites in rapid succession.

FanSnap

Have you searched for event tickets lately? It’s not fun, and it’s not easy. FanSnap hopes to change that by providing a one-stop source for finding tickets to sporting events, theatre productions, and concerts.

FanSnap doesn’t sell tickets; it lets you find tickets being sold by brokers and others in the secondary ticket market. At the moment, I don’t see inventory from official ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster or TicketsWest. They get inventory from more than 50 ticket resellers, making it a much easier way to shop than visiting the individual web sites of that many ticket brokers. To borrow a comparison Om Malik recently made, it’s like Zillow for event tickets.

compfight

Strange name for a Flickr image search engine, but don’t let it keep you away. Compfight offers a handful of customizations that help you drill down into Flickr’s enormous pool of user-uploaded photos.

You can search the full text of a photo page (title, description, and tags), or if that’s producing too many matches, you can just search tags. You can search for photos that allow Creative Commons commercial usage. You can search for photos that are original to Flickr. You can also turn Flickr’s Safe Search on or off. And you can combine all these options in any search combination you want. And rather than Flickr’s clunky, default, 10-at-a-time search results, you get dozens of thumbnails with compfight.

Kedrix

There are plenty of meta-search engines out there, but only one that wants you to “mearch” instead of “search.” That one is Kedrix, which is trying to coin a new word based on the words “meta” and “search.” That doesn’t work for me, but the search engine does, thankfully.

The Kedrix premise is simple: It’s actually not a meta-search engine in the traditional sense. Rather than mash results from different search engines together (as Metacrawler, Dogpile, Mamma, and others do), Kedrix separates the results from the four main search engines on tabs. Google results are all under one tab, Yahoo under another, and so forth. In that sense, it’s more like a search engine comparison tool. And that makes it somewhat more valuable to SEOs (who like to compare results across different engines) than your standard meta-search engine.

Pittman said Image Search has huge growth opportunity for Google. Google explained that text doesn’t always describe the image, so they use other techniques. They use image processing, computer vision, and visual search (understanding something about the pixels in the picture). Visual search is something they are really excited about, including facial recognition. For example, imagine uploading your friend’s picture to Google and it will find matches of images across the web to that face. Google is also exploring “scene analysis,” identifying objects outside of people in a picture, such as chairs or even landmarks. Finally, Pittman talks about GPS technologies built into many phones, which is used in Google’s Panaramio. So you can also search by city or region.

Here is the full interview as a video:

A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search from the New York Times covers a new research paper (PDF format) from Google that talks about a way of ranking images based on analyzing "visual links" between them.

Image search at the major search engines today largely relies on looking at words that are used around images — on the pages that host them, in image file names, and in ALT text associated with them. No real image recognition is done by any of the majors. Search for "apples," and they haven’t actually somehow scanned the images itself to "see" if they contain pictures of apples.

The method in Google’s paper changes that. In short, a group of images retrieved for a query using traditional search methods is then further analyzed. Image recognition software finds which images in the group seem most similar to each other. It then estimates "visual hyperlinks" between them to produce a final ranking.

The last part is important. No actual hyperlinks on the web are used to rank the images, if I understand the paper correctly, other than in the first traditional retrieval process. Instead, the algorithm guesses at how the images would be linked together, with those being most similar having more virtual links to each other. As a result, the most "linked to" images are calculated to rank first.

The image above comes from the paper and shows examples of images found in a search for [mona lisa]. The lines illustrate how they are all estimated to link together, with the two in the middle (as shown in the close-up below) deemed the most relevant based on linkage:

The New York Times article says the researchers call the method "VisualRank," though that term is not used in the actual paper, which is entitled "PageRank for Product Image Search," coming from how the method was applied to product search results as a test. The paper itself talks of Image Rank at one point, so VisualRank might be a new name the researchers are trying out.

Image recognition isn’t new or unique to Google, though this twist on using virtual hyperlinks is. For background on what others are doing, see Teaching Google To See Images from Chris Sherman last year. It covers players such as Riya. My article on Polar Rose, Polar Rose Promising Face Recognition Image Search, also provides some further background on image recognition as well as the Google Images Labeler that relies on human judgment to identify image.

For further discussion, see Techmeme.

I tried several times to find the images, using different people’s names along with related phrases including “Facebook profile,” and was unable to duplicate the results. (Google has been including Facebook Profile data in search results for some time.)