Yahoo Adds Travel Photo Tours To Image Search

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.