Flickr-izing Image Search
- Posted June 26th, 2007 at 9:50 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Flickr
Whether you’re planning a vacation to Italy and want a preview of some of the sights in Rome like Piazza di Spagna or The Vatican, doing a horticultural homework assignment on heirloom tomatoes, or perhaps seeing what food at the French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley, California looks like, Yahoo! Image Search is the starting point for many of you out there. 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.
We had a of couple objectives for this integration. First, we wanted to ensure that we respected the contributions from the Flickr community and give credit where credit is due. Results from Flickr are attributed to the photographer with a ‘by membername on Flickr’ attribution. As usual, clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the photo. And clicking on the photographer’s name sends you to their photo stream so you can see their public photos.
Second, we wanted to build a scalable integration that surfaced the freshest, most relevant content from Flickr. As a result, we’ve built this integration via a direct feed versus an API, ensuring timely results for your image queries, including any modifications or additions that are made in Flickr.
This integration brings another layer of relevance, freshness and, dare we say, beauty to our Image Search. And it’s only the beginning. Please let us know what’s working for you and what you’d like to see in future integrations in the comments below.
UPDATE: Thanks for your comments, guys. With regard to your privacy concerns, yes there is an opt-out option. Just as you can select how your images are viewed within the Flickr community, you can also choose which images are omitted from Yahoo! Image Search and other search engines. For details on the different layers of privacy within Flickr, take a look at the privacy page.
Ujwal Tickoo
Yahoo! Search, Sr. Product Manager
- 21 Comments
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Very nicely done. It’s great to see you leveraging some of the great products you have inhouse, like you did with Y Answers.
What licenses should one set to Flickr photos to be listed in the Y! Image Search and (probably more important) what license to use to be _not_ listed?
The Dude is right; can you share a little more info on licenses? Or is it just that ALL public photos are listed, private are hidden?
If people’s copyrighted images are showing up in image results they’re far more likely to be copied and pasted into someone’s piece of design work or put on another website without prior permission or royalty fees, etc.
I am also a little concerned about licenses and my images on flickr – I have enough troubles with natural search and my images!
I totally agree. If Flickr were free to all, then there’d be no complaint, but as a paying customer I want a complete opt out option for this my photos should NOT appear in the Yahoo Image search. Without such an option it’s time to find a more unscrupulous host for photos. If this is an across the board, it is quite disgusting.
OK, after first getting quite upset about this, a trawl through the permissions reveals a ‘hide photos from public searches’ option. Can I assume that having checked this, on a paid up account, my photos are now immune from such abuse by Yahoo?
Great concept.A little more illustrations and some tutorials will plenty of good to our readers.
This is a very nice complement to the search engine. Of course getting more image sources would be a nice improvement.
They should recognize if you type in a place and offer to show you the Flickr Place Map. Or automatically embed it into the page. (Would also be cool in the results if it mentioned where the photo was taken if the photo was geotagged.)
I won’t be renewing my flickr account this year. This is totally unacceptable.
You people just complain about Yahoo! new features and releases, if it was a Google release everybody would say: Great! Google is so wonderful!. Go mind about your privacy loss on other services that are well worse than Yahoo!.
I don´t mind been crawled by Yahoo! Image Search, if there is a picture that I don´t want to be crawled I´ll change the permissions, it is simple as that.
@Rodrigo:
The privacy stuff moved me away from Google years ago.
Changing permissions is not the issue here, of course I assume “private” images are not showing up. The problem here is license. I’m marked most of my images “All rights reserved” and hope they will not show up.
Can someone from Yahoo! explain what licenses are being used in the image search inclusion?
Mmm, I should’ve looked at my Flickr settings page sooner (especially the Privacy & Permissions tab). Over there you have the option to opt-in/out.
I rest my case, good new search feature ;)
Just to make it clear, I think this is a good thing. I dont mind my photos showing up – however I enquired because I know people will.
I think people who blown it out of proportion and started on with their ‘I’m a paying customer’ or ‘I wont be renewing my subscription’ lark need to get a grip.
There was obviously going to be considerations to privacy and copyright, etc – but it was just a case of where these options and details were.
Hey guys, appreciate the feedback. Check out the update I made to the post around privacy concerns.
Thanks,
Ujwal
This is a pretty awesome feature. Maybe there can be a link to something like “See more photos from XYZ tagged with ‘gem’”?
Yes i am totally satisfied with the comments provided by Lisa regarding the crawling of the image. If anyone won’t like there image to be crawled he/she can disallow the premission of the image folder to be crawled. that’s it. I think yahoo provides the best feature rather than google or any other search engine.
i’ve been with yahoo email from the beginning. but if i can’t cut and paste a few pictures into my emails any more… i’ll need to go else where… & if i am using my cable company for my email box… i’ll just change to google for my home page.
flicrs great… but i just want to paste a few small pic in my emails from time to time…
i bet i’m not the only one who’s ready to move… just thought you should know…
and this seems to be the only place i can find to express myself to your company. sw
I liked the feature very much. I also did a comparison with google image search on a very small scale. Overall, I think this is a much better service than before and is definitely google image search killer.
Here is the link: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-2VHiCE8zc6edKEkg_L5Xl6VXzX9k?p=2
I haven’t seen such a comprehensive list of privacy settings on any soical site. It virtually takes care of all my privacy concerns regarding search. I think most of the guys who have seen these privacy settings would agree with me. Good day!
haven’t seen such a comprehensive list of privacy settings on any soical site. It virtually takes care of all my privacy concerns regarding search. I think most of the guys who have seen these privacy settings would agree with me. Good day!