Image search could use a little organization, especially when you’re searching for generic terms like place names — cities, states, or tourist/geographic attractions. Who wants to browse through a couple million images of Boston to help plan your first visit there? Yahoo is making it easier to virtually tour popular places with what it calls a travel image refiner — photos of popular destinations are organized in a new left-side column to speed up the search/browse/find process.

On a search for Boston, as shown above, Yahoo lists 10 popular destinations within Boston on the left, and each can be clicked to bring up a new set of photos specific to that part of Boston. You can essentially take a virtual tour of Boston itself, and if you’re planning a visit, get a better idea of the destinations you want to see in person.

Yahoo says this refinement option has been applied now to location-specific searches, but the company plans to add it to other types of image searches in the future. On an image search for “California,” I found an interesting addition — recent photos from Yahoo News, like these from the Fortune Brainstorm event in Pasadena.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced they have added a very useful search filter to Yahoo Image Search. The filter is known as the creative commons filter and it allows searchers to find images that can be reused for commercial reasons or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

To see the filter, go to Yahoo Image Search and search on something. Then click on “more filters,” and more filters will slide down. On the far right is the “Creator allows reuse” option. Here is a picture:

This can be a very useful filter for image searchers.

Yahoo announced they have enhanced their image previews. Virtually all search engines show you a preview of the image in a framed page set, when you click from the search results on a specific image. Yahoo has taken this one step forward by enhancing that preview page.

The enhancements include a search box, additional image results from your previous search and then additional search suggestions. Here is a picture of a search for sunny doodles, one of my favorite treats:

Google does something similar, in that they show a preview with a search box, but Google does not show additional images, nor search suggestions in the frame window. Live Search handles it slightly differently, by showing other images on the left hand side and the search box at the top, while displaying the image source in the middle right frame.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced they have added additional filter options to Yahoo Image Search. You can now filter Yahoo Images by size, color, specific dimensions and even if it is from Flickr or not.

For example, a search on grass allows you to click on “More filters.” When you click on it, these options all appear. Here is a screen capture:

Google recently added the option to filter images by specific dimensions as well.

Amit Agarwal reports Yahoo Image Search has added some additional search filters and options. I personally do not see these options when I access Yahoo Image Search, but Amit posted screen captures.

The options include the ability to filter by sizes include wallpaper, large, small or even a custom size. You can select black & white and or color, you can select photo or graphic and you can restrict the search to Flickr only or not from Flickr.

In related news, Google has exposed additional search options such as the faces feature we covered a while back.

Postscript: Yahoo told me this is a limited test, a Yahoo spokesperson told me:

This is part of ongoing tests to identify how we can make search even more relevant and deliver the best possible online user experience.

Google’s Matt Cutts has lent his personal blog to the Google Images search team so they could debunk a rumor that Google censored an image of an Egyptian football player, Mohammad Aboutrika, stripping off his team jersey during the African Cup Of Nations to show a "Sympathize With Gaza" T-shirt underneath. No censoring, says Google — it was just a problem with Google Images being stale. I can totally believe that explanation. It’s just embarrassing that it’s the same explanation Google gave when a similar question over Google Images came up in 2004. Over four years later, you’d expect the image freshness issues to have been resolved by now.

Let’s go backwards, then we’ll come up to date. In November 2004, after the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture scandal erupted, people went looking for images on Google Images. Pictures weren’t to be found, making some such as Slashdot wonder if censorship was involved.

No censorship, Google said. It passed along a message from no less than Sergey Brin himself on the matter:

In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed [sic] that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.

In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib photos] [abu graib photos] [google.com] to get plenty of what you are looking for.

Google Images was out of date, it turned out — several months out of date. But that fueled even more questions. How come the pictures WERE showing up there, then disappeared, as John Battelle wondered:

I don’t quite understand how things that were once there (according to those on the thread mentioned above) fell out.

I followed up on that aspect with Google at the time, and the explanation was that Google News and Google Images have their own separate databases. However, what’s in the Google News images database can also be found in Google Images. The Abu Ghraib pictures from Google News were showing up in Google Images for the time period Google News keeps images stored (Google never told me how long this was, but I figured for maybe a week or two). Once the images were dropped from Google News, there was a lag until Google Images itself actually stored them.

Now to the recent post from Google:

It turns out this image was difficult to find on images.google.com for the first few days after the match, and the story that’s gathered steam is that Google removed it. Some outlets said that this was under pressure from the Israeli government.

First of all, let’s put the story straight: we definitely didn’t do this. In fact, from the very beginning you could find the image quite easily on YouTube and also on Google News.

The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that it can take a few days between when an image appears and when it’s crawled by the Googlebot, as explained here. It’s there now – you can find several copies of the image on a search for [Aboutrika] or [Aboutrika Gaza] quite easily.

OK, first it sounds like Google News still has a separate images database (which is why the pictures were there) but that Google Images no longer taps into it at all. If not, you wonder why. You’d think Google would know at this point that people are going to turn to Google Images for news image-related content. Heck, over at Ask.com, you can do searches there and even get in the right-hand column "News Image" matches coming up.

Second — I know Google Images doesn’t have a blog, but Google itself does – and this post belongs there, not on Matt’s personal blog. That’s part of what the Google Blog is supposed to be doing, so repost this over there, Google.

To conclude, over three years later, the "we’re just behind" explanation doesn’t work so well. No, I don’t think things are being censored. But now Google takes a second strike over the issue of image censorship for exactly the same reason.

For the record, I thought it was worth checking the other search engines. Yahoo has one image here; Microsoft here, though the image has been removed and shows a broken image placeholder. Ask shows nothing. Also, when the image wasn’t showing at Google, it also wasn’t showing at Yahoo, for at least one person who bothered to check. While Google may have looked bad for being stale, it was hardly alone.

Yahoo Image Search now contains photos from Yahoo’s Flickr photo sharing service, ironically catching Yahoo up to Google, Microsoft and Ask.com — all of which already included Flickr photos in their respective image search engines.

Yahoo blogged about the change:

Now when you use Yahoo! Image Search, in addition to the billions of images we crawl from the Web, you’ve got access to over 300 million images from the amazing community of photographers on Flickr.

As noted in both the Yahoo post and Search Engine Journal’s story on the integration, Flickr photos shown in Yahoo Image Search have hyperlinks back to the Flickr member that shared the photo.

For example, a Yahoo Image search for danny sullivan returns many images. But in this one from Flickr, you’ll see the name "Tamar Weinberg" is a blue hyperlink:

That link leads to Tamar’s album at Flickr.

Yahoo Images also supports the site command to restrict photos to certain sites. Just put the domain you want to focus on after the site: operator, like this:

barry schwartz site:flickr.com

That does a search for photos matching the words [barry schwartz] that are on Flickr.com.

Postscript From Danny:

Both Thomas Hawk (here) and Loren Baker (here) discuss how the new integration makes Yahoo Images much more relevant that rival image search engines. Personally, I didn’t find this so convincing.

Thomas listed several examples, which I went through myself:

• Searches for himself on Yahoo Images brought up more pictures of himself than did rival search engines, but Yahoo Images still had plenty of crud.
   
• Searches for Robert Scoble seemed better at Live Image Search than Yahoo despite the duplication of several photos, plus Live Images has a much more superior image searching interface.
   
• Searches for Mount Tam felt about the same regardless of service used.
   
• Searches for Tag Cathedral also felt about the same.
   
• Searches for Sacramento Train Museum did seem better at Yahoo Images than others.