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.

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: Images

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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