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.