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October 21, 2004

Image Search: 1 Billion and Counting

Everyone likes big numbers, so we're glad to announce that Yahoo Image Search has surpassed a billion and is still growing. But rather than brag about what an impressive achievement that is and how the new results page sports a cleaner layout, we wanted to share some interesting tidbits.

Where do all these images come from?

With a billion image references now in our index, it's really interesting to break the numbers down a bit. For example, we all know that the web is truly a global medium. Is that reflected in the images we've seen?

It sure is. Images appearing in English language content now account for only 50% of our index. All of the largest percentage gains are international. A growing percentage of our images are from CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) content. But the Europeans aren't slacking either! No matter how you slice it, the increasing usage of the web in Europe and Asia really stands out in the numbers.

We also regularly pull in image results from our own media sites: news, movies, TV, travel, sports, and so on. For example, searching for images of Donald Trump from The Apprentice returns pictures from the popular TV show.

It's not just about finding pretty pictures...

We all know there are a lot of people looking for pictures of Jessica Simpson. But there are also times when using a more visual search makes it easier to find what you're looking for.

Earlier today, Bradley Horowitz (our director of media search) demonstrated this. When he was looking for baseboard heater covers, he used image search. That way he could visually scan the results very quickly to find the product he wanted.

We're obviously proud of it. So go ahead and try it out. And keep your eyes out for new features. We've got 'em coming.

Kaigene J. Jau - Multimedia Search
Jeremy Zawodny - Technical Yahoo

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Comments

Image search is indeed one of the coolest things going on in search today. One is able to build an amazing collection of visual artwork by using it and collecting images. One of my favorite things to do is to do searchs and then save the amazing artwork and photographs to my hard drive and then play them on my 42" plasma in the living room through Micrsoft's Media Center PC while music plays in the background.

I've used the image searches at Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves. I find that Google's are the best in general. One thing that I like about Google is that if you search for "large images" they tend to come up with only high res images. Yahoo comes up with high res images if you use "wallpaper" as a filter but the results are much less than from Google's "large image" preference. If you use Yahoo's "large image" preference which turns out as many results as Google's, I've found that a lot of the images are of less than high res quality for display on my 42" plasma in the living room. I think one way around this might be to let the user actually set the size ranking vs. using Yahoo's pre-arragned settings where large may include some less than high res issues.

Also I would like to see a "photoblog" only filter. One of the problem with image search on all of the search engines is that their is so much crap that you have to wade through. In general, Yahoo! should try to track the high quality image sites, artistic sites, etc. and offer some kind of filter that then weeds out the everyday poor quality snapshots that litters your search. You could still get everything if you wanted but to run a search of say only registered photoblogs for New York City would turn up a more interesting mixture of photos.

Posted by: Thomas Hawk | October 22, 2004 07:40 AM

How about linking the image search results with the webpages (if present) of which they (the images) are a part? Taking your "baseboard heater covers" example, once Brad found the right image, he could click the "link" below it which would take him to the webpage of that product.

Ofcourse, you could put links with the images only if the keywords associated with the image resonate with those associated with it's webpage too. This could be extended to other format searches too like doc, pdf, etc.

Posted by: Ashwin N | October 22, 2004 08:21 AM

I love image search, but I think it'd be great to fix the wee typo at the bottom of the page:

Take Yahoo! Image Search with you: Browse from billons of images on your phone.-->

should be "billions" (with 2 'l's)

(even if the pictures are worth thousands of words a piece)

thanks!

Posted by: friendly, anonymous coward | November 3, 2004 04:44 PM

Thank you for your feedback. The typo has been changed for the next production cycle, and you'll see the correction displayed on the page shortly.

Posted by: Kaigene Jau | November 3, 2004 05:27 PM

how do i put pictures on yahoo so when i search for it it will show what i searched for

Posted by: alec howell | April 27, 2005 07:23 AM

alec howell you have to put them on a web page, then yahoo will find them.

Posted by: wallpapers | May 23, 2005 09:30 AM

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Posted by: muhead | July 2, 2005 01:41 AM

I love image search, but I think it'd be great to fix the wee typo at the bottom of the page:

Take Yahoo! Image Search with you: Browse from billons of images on your phone.-->

should be "billions" (with 2 'l's)

(even if the pictures are worth thousands of words a piece)

thanks!

Posted by: TugJobs | October 4, 2005 11:34 AM

I am just wondering...how do you put a picture on Yahoo! Image search yourself. I want to put pictures there so people can see them too

Posted by: unknown | January 14, 2006 03:32 PM