Yahoo Images Gains Flickr Photos

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.