Building on our initial announcement of Flickr’s integration into Yahoo! Image Search earlier this summer, we’ve now expanded the integration to the countries, regions and languages listed below. You can now access many Flickr images when doing your Yahoo! Image Search from the following countries:

Asia, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada , Cade (Brazil), Canada (in French), Swiss, Swiss (in French), Swiss (in Italian), Catalan, Germany, Denmark, Espanola, Spain, France, Indonesia, Indonesia (English), India, Italy, Malaysia, Malaysia (English), Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Sweden, Singapore, Thailand, United Kingdom & Ireland, Vietnam, New Zealand, Philippines (Tagalog), Mexico, and Japan.

With this launch, Flickr metadata like title, tags and comments can be used to surface Flickr results on Yahoo! Image Search results pages, making many of the millions of photographs from the Flickr community available to Yahoo! Image Search users. For example, type in ‘Tower Bridge‘ and the ranking algorithm looks at metadata from the images and determines the rank order for the results.

Of course, these are photos marked public by Flickr users; we’re not showing photos marked as private.

With this expanded integration, users can further discover and explore the world of images. Here’s a snapshot of Flickr images surfacing on the Yahoo! Image Search results page for ‘Tower Bridge’:

In addition to the internationally expanded Flickr/ Yahoo! Image Search integration, we’ve rolled out a new feature called Explorer Bar to enhance the Yahoo! Image Search experience. We introduced the Explorer Bar for searchers who want to discover more by looking at what other users are searching for. Today we have it for entertainment and location-related content, and we plan to expand to other categories in the future.

For example if you search for ‘Harry Potter‘, you find images of him as well as an Explorer Bar showing you a preview of images of other characters you might want to search for.

The same goes for cities. If you’re planning a trip to ‘London‘ and would like to check out some pictures, the Explorer Bar also shows you other interesting places that might strike your fancy.

So the next time you’re looking for an image, check out the new features on Yahoo! Image Search and let us know what you think!

Deepali Tamhane
Product Manager, Yahoo! Multimedia Search

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

We recently added thumbnails of Flickr images for popular domestic and international landmark searches into Yahoo! Search. Now you can easily find amazing and unique photos of your favorite landmarks. Try it with Empire State Building, Chichen Itza, and Machu Picchu for example.

With the help of Flickr Interestingness, we are now able to surface some of the most beautiful, creative, and popular photos from the Flickr community directly into the search results. Clicking on the thumbnails will take you to Flickr where you can explore further, set up your own account, and share your best shots too. This feature adds to the popular Flickr integration for funny photos and interesting photos on Yahoo! Search.

Whether you are planning a trip to see the Colosseum, Seattle Space Needle, or Pyramids, want to rekindle memories of past trips to the Sydney Opera House, Mount Shasta, or Tower Bridge, or have pride for your local landmark (for me it’s the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge) we think you’ll be awed by the Flickr community’s photos.

We plan to continue the expansion of this experience and very much welcome your ideas and thoughts.

Carlos Teran
Yahoo! Search

Flickr just launched a bunch of new features including the new Flickr Camera Finder, which shows you the most popular cameras used on Flickr. If you’re in the market for a camera, or perhaps just curious what the pros use, you can use the finder to see which camera models are popular, track usage over time, view product specs, prices, and user reviews. You can also view interesting photos taken with that particular camera for a quick quality check. The product specs, prices, and user reviews are powered by the Yahoo! Shopping APIs, with links to Yahoo! Shopping for more detailed purchase information.

This launch is a good example of combining different parts of Yahoo! to help improve the user experience. Flickr users can view what?s popular in the Flickr community and then use that data to help guide their camera research and purchase decisions on Yahoo! Shopping.

We hope you enjoy this new feature and welcome your feedback on ways to make it even more useful.

Thanks!
Jen Faenza
Product Manager, Yahoo! Shopping