Explore Points of Interest with Yahoo! Image Search

What are some of the must-sees in Barcelona? What are the most popular landmarks in San Francisco? Whether you are an armchair traveler or avid globetrotter, you can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination in Yahoo! Image Search. With the new travel image refiner, we are continuing our focus on satisfying user intent through a deeper understanding the Web and presenting related objects from the real world. The travel image refiner taps into this “Web of Objects” and lets you explore these popular points of interest, giving you more contextual information about your destination.

Let’s say you are planning your first trip to Rome. The new travel image refiner shows categories for popular destinations such as the Colosseum, Pantheon, and Trevi Fountain.

Click on the Pantheon tab and you will see an overlay of images so you can virtually tour image results for this ancient temple without leaving your original search results page. You can explore any of the popular places to visit in Rome and use the many images you have at your fingertips to help you decide where to go.

Even if you’re not planning on hopping on a plane soon, you can use the travel image refiner to find out more about a place you’ve heard about. Or you can use it to check out how your hometown has changed by delving into images from some of your favorite places in town.

The Yahoo! Image Search refiner is currently available for location-specific searches, but we are planning to expand this capability to other types of image searches as well. In the meantime, explore aspects of cities like Las Vegas or find pics of a major tourist destination, like Barcelona. We would love to hear what you think!

Yahoo! Image Search Team

Ramu Adapala, Anand Ramani, Sriram J. Satish, Borkur Sigurbjornsson, and Roelof van Zwol