Social Sharing On Images:

Yahoo Images enables you to share the images you find on Yahoo Image Search with your friends on Facebook or Twitter, not Google +. When you click on an image result and are taken to the larger image, Yahoo provides two small links for sharing on those networks. The links take your friends to the Yahoo Image Search page, where you can preview the image – it does not take you to the owner (host page) of the image.

Continuous Image Scrolling:

Yahoo also announced that you can now continuously scroll through the images in the Yahoo Image Search results. Yahoo said, “users can scroll down the Yahoo! Image search results to see more and more photos! Type a query for a current event and users will see photos pertaining to breaking news, along with the ability to continuously scroll through the results – all unique to Yahoo! Image Search.”

I do not see these features yet, so I am not sure how continuous scrolling differs from Bing and Google’s image search page – but Yahoo said it is “all unique” to them.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo Gives Image Search A New Look
• Yahoo Redesigns Image & Video Search Pages To Show Trending Results
• Yahoo Enhances Image Previews
• Yahoo Search Adds Additional Image Filter Options
• Google Revamps Image Search, Debuts Expanded Image Search Ads
• Bing Improves Image Search With Tabs & Page Preview

Do a search and the results page shows all matches in a grid, with each image sized almost uniformly no matter their true dimensions or orientation (horizontal vs. vertical). Each image expands when you hover it.

The new layout also includes a series of tabs across the top of the image results, with choices that may include “Top Images,” “Latest,” “Galleries” and “Facebook.”

In its announcement today, Yahoo says that the “Latest” tab will show when your search involves a trending topics (like “Somalia” in the screenshot above). The “Galleries” tab will show up if Yahoo has a photo gallery from three other Yahoo properties: Yahoo News, Flickr or OMG. The Facebook tab will appear if you’ve connected your Yahoo and Facebook accounts, and “if your search results include matches from your Facebook friends’ name, photo album names or album descriptions.”

The inclusion of Facebook photos in Yahoo Image Search isn’t new; it was launched last year as part of a series of changes to the user experience.

One other new feature is that all Yahoo image results will now be browsable in a slideshow-style interface.

This display was available previously in photo galleries, but now applies to any image search on Yahoo.

Many of these new features were previewed at the recent “Runway” event last month. The two biggest changes or enhancements that users will immediately notice involve image search and a new “accordion” module at the top of search results (though it doesn’t always appear).

Do a search for “Toy Story 3″ or “Lady Gaga,” for example, and you’ll see this:

Users can flip through panes that contain different types of information. In the case of Toy Story 3 there are “overview,” “video” and “Twitter” tabs. The content types and number of tabs will vary and be relevant to the query. In the case of Lady Gaga there are additional “events” tabs and “album” tabs. The events tab contains a link to buy tickets. There are also horizontal tabs with related content on top.

Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that there will be more such transactional elements in search results going forward. It doesn’t currently exist but one could easily imagine an embedded OpenTable link tied to a specific restaurant query. And there are other scenarios in which this accordion module could enable actions or transactions. Travel is another category that quickly comes to mind.

I spoke to Seth about the potential appearance of display and rich media advertising in this area of the page. (Earlier today I moderated the SMX East panel on search and display, so it’s on my brain.)  He said that isn’t the case at launch but Yahoo has thoughts along those lines in certain commercial contexts.

This module also enables “discovery” of information in a way that traditional search results do not. There’s a mixture of push and pull going on here, which is very interesting. Accordingly it goes beyond the “smart box”/”one box” universal search approach favored in the past couple of years.

Consistent with the notion of making page one more “actionable,” Yahoo is integrating what it calls “quick apps” into search farther down the page. The first of these is a Netflix app that will open a window and enable “Netflix members to add movies to their Queue right from the Search results page.”  You could also watch trailers and theoretically stream entire movies in this window.

The philosophy behind all these moves involves taking search “from finding to doing.”

As mentioned, image search is being revamped. Image pages get a new more visually engaging and “immersive” environment. Yahoo is putting more slideshows (from Flickr and other Yahoo sites) in image search results that then lead to pages that look like this:

Beyond this, Yahoo image search will allow people to “view personally meaningful public Facebook albums from friends when they sign-in and connect their Yahoo! accounts to Facebook.”

Finally Yahoo says that iPhone and Android users will see faster and “more sophisticated” search results built on HTML5. The new Yahoo Finance app is an example of this.

This collection of new features and tools rolls out immediately in the US and then globally next year.

Yahoo has been promising UI/UX innovation for many months and these new capabilities represent something of a down payment. However the company says it will continue to do more and go further over the coming months. This “is just the beginning.”

Seth told me that user reaction to the accordion module in user testing had been very positive. What do you think?

The new pages are no longer dull looking, they show up to “five pages of topics that are trending in search,” in a sleek black background. You can scroll through the pages manually or turn on the autoscroll feature. As part of this announcement, Yahoo keeps pushing the “engagement” metric saying:

Already, we’ve seen double-digit percentage increases in engagement for both image and video search since launching these new homepages, with a 60% increase in time spent on the image search homepage.

Here are screen shots of the new look:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.