Yahoo! Image Search now provides the ability to share any image through Facebook and Twitter. By clicking on the image from the search results page, users can browse effortlessly through full-size images via the desktop browser and share with their preferred network of family and friends.

In addition to social sharing, users can scroll down the Yahoo! Image search results to see more and more photos! Type a query for a current event and users will see photos pertaining to breaking news, along with the ability to continuously scroll through the results – all unique to Yahoo! Image Search.

Available for all four sections – Top Images, Latest, Galleries and Facebook – we believe the continuous scrolling and social sharing features will provide the most effective discovery and sharing experience for all image search queries. This, together with the richer content that is uniquely offered by Yahoo!, will offer users an even better, more immersive search experience.

So what are you waiting for, check out some amazing examples below and start scrolling pages of photos on Yahoo! Image Search today!

–– Girish Ananthakrishnan, Krishanu Seal and Caroline Tsay of the Image/Video Search product team

The following changes are available now on the Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports search results pages:

• Clean and Simple – A cleaner and simplistic look and feel that helps you find what is most important to you and to enable you to take action faster.
• Automatic Tabs – Easily accessible tabs will automatically appear right below the Search box to give you the specialized content you may be looking for on our other vertical search results pages.  The tabs that may appear, based on the search results content, are Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports.
• Left Filters – Filters on the left side of the results will appear, for sorting results by time and related searches.

The query-aware tabs make it easier for you to dive into a specific vertical search experience, such as the Sports search results page example below. The related athletes filter on the left, combined with sports videos results on the right, also enhance this results page.

The improved News search results page will also include filters on the left for news sources, as well as news videos to the right of the search results.

Since last month’s Image Search update, we have made the above changes to the Image search results page, plus we have added:

• A larger pool of Facebook images to also include public profiles and fan pages
• A richer “Latest” pictures experience from across even more Yahoo! content
• Better recommendations at the end of galleries

Below is an example of the Image search results page for the “President Obama” query, which brings you the latest, most relevant pictures to the top, and indicates how long ago each image was published.

For the same query, you can also click on “Facebook” on the left rail to get the most popular public Facebook albums on President Obama.

If you type in “sunset,” amazing galleries from Yahoo! News, Flickr and omg! surface.  You’ll also see an end-of-gallery page with more recommendations for continued searching.

On the Video search results page, we also feature videos from across various Yahoo! Properties, in addition to the top web videos.

The new design you see today incorporates feedback from users like you.  We are continuously making new improvements and looking for even more ways to make Yahoo! Search better for you.  Keep checking back in on the Search blog, as more changes are planned for the coming weeks.

Please check out the changes by doing a few searches on search.yahoo.com, and let us know what you think of the new search results pages.

– Paul Ko, Girish Ananthakrishnan and Caroline Tsay from the Yahoo! Search team

The new search results page sports a neatly tiled look, with each image equally sized, then becoming larger when you hover over one. 

In addition to displaying the best images from the web, the new Image Search includes three new category tabs to better categorize and present the images that interest you:

• Latest:  The “Latest” tab will automatically appear for image search results of trending topics, such as images of events, celebrities and news. For example, the “Latest” tab appears in a “President Obama” search shown below.
• Galleries:  The “Galleries” tab will appear for image search results that include photo galleries from Yahoo! News, Flickr and OMG.
• Facebook: If you choose to connect your Facebook account with Yahoo! Image Search, a “Facebook” tab will automatically appear if your search results include matches from your Facebook friends’ name, photo album names or album descriptions.

One of the most significant changes we’ve made to Yahoo! Image Search is the way images are displayed and navigated. By clicking on any image on the search results page, the image will appear on a fresh page allowing users to browse effortlessly through full-size images with a simple click on the desktop browser.

That’s right, no more clicking back and forth between pages to few the next image result. Available for all four sections– Top Images, Latest, Galleries and Facebook – we believe this provides the most clear viewing experience, letting you easily flip through images without missing a single detail.

We’re still enhancing Yahoo! Image search to bring you a stunning image search experience that is fast, clean, timely and personal.  Stay tuned for more design changes and integrations in the coming weeks.

Check out the new Yahoo! Image Search results page today by doing a search on images.yahoo.com.  

– Girish Ananthakrishnan, Image Search product team

This was exactly the challenge we posed to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Multimedia Conference held this year in Italy. This competition invites researchers to submit solutions to challenges posed by companies like Yahoo! with presentations that are half elevator pitch and half American Idol.

The winners of this year’s Yahoo!-sponsored challenge are Jana Machajdik, Allan Hanbury, and Julian Stöttinger from the Vienna University of Technology for their proposal to solve “Novel Image Understanding.” Their work, titled “Understanding Affect in Images,” used findings from art history and the psychology of emotion to design a machine-learning system that labels images based on their emotional content.

Text tags associated with an image often tell us about the object in an image but not about its emotional content. The Yahoo! Novel Image-Understanding Challenge was to invent new and useful ways to organize and structure image content. We posed this challenge because we believe that this type of science can eventually offer better results for information and entertainment requests on Yahoo! Search by helping us better organize multimedia content to fit user needs and desires.

Ms. Machajdik developed a simple way to learn what images are considered “cute” or match other descriptions so that queries like “cute kittens” can return appropriate images. She applied her knowledge of the psychology of art and art theory to design features that summarized the color, texture, composition, and content of the image. Using carefully considered emotional categories, she then employed machine-learning techniques to train classifiers. Her system rates images along eight different axes of emotion: anger, disgust, fear, sad, amusement, awe, contentment, and excitement.

Here are some images with analysis from the team’s classifier system:

We’re excited to work with Ms. Machajdik and the broader research community to collectively find ways to bring this kind of science to you and make your multimedia search experiences even better over time. Stay tuned for more from Yahoo! Search on this in the future.

You can read more about her paper and presentation on Ms. Machajdik’s website, imagemotion.org.

Go to the ACM Challenge 2010 website for more information about the competition, other challenges, and winners.

Kaushal Kurapati and Malcolm Slaney

Kaushal Kurapati, a Senior Director for the Yahoo! Search Product, was one of the judges and Malcolm Slaney, a Principle Scientist at Yahoo! Research, helped organize the competition this year.

In August and September 2010, we conducted exploratory studies at our Bangalore and Taiwan usability labs to help us better understand people’s behaviors, intentions, and consumption of multimedia search from any provider.

We wanted to answer some key questions about multimedia search: How do people search for multimedia online? How do people consume the image or video results that they get through multimedia search? And what do people like or dislike about the experience of searching for videos and images online?

User experience research at Yahoo! is accomplished primarily through direct observation of use situations – either in the lab or in natural environments like people’s homes, offices or internet cafes. Our labs are fully equipped, so design researchers can conduct lab based studies like user interviews, usability tests, and focus groups.

In the multimedia user research, we learned some interesting insights:

• Though it is difficult to pinpoint a ‘trend’ in image search topics, we found that searches for movies and celebrities emerged as popular topics across the countries where we conducted the research. (India and Taiwan).
• In India, we found that visual thumbnails are a key ‘hook’ in image search. Other information like resolution and URL are secondary influencers that people might look at, but only after the image thumbnail.

During the research we also got a lot of feedback about the new Facebook integration’ feature that we launched recently. This feature allows users to search for albums that friends and family have posted on Facebook, through Yahoo! image search. A lean back “theater mode” experience enables users to enjoy the high quality images. To use this feature, users need to link up their Yahoo user ID and Facebook ID as a onetime process. To see and use this feature, type a search query on Yahoo! Image Search, then scroll to the end of the image results page. Currently this feature is available through http://images.search.yahoo.com/
In the exploratory study we did in Bangalore, most participants reacted positively and enthusiastically about integrating Facebook to image search:

• Users liked being able to view an entire ‘album’ versus individual pictures related to a search topic. They told us that it was more holistic and saved them the time spent to search or do multiple searches in order to create the ‘whole picture.’
• Users felt that Facebook image integration adds a familiar face and contact point to image search results, making the experience more personally relevant and interactive.
• Most users preferred to see all search results on a single long page and scroll rather than go from page to page. People say it’s more helpful to display all the images on the same page so they can quickly get to the things they’re interested in on the page, without needing many refinements to their searches.

In the exploratory study in Taiwan, our study participants felt that it was interesting to find Facebook photo albums from their friends, but some users asked questions about privacy.

We would love to hear from you if you use multimedia search, such as Yahoo! Image Search or Yahoo! video search. If you have some feedback on what you liked or disliked about your experience searching for  images or videos, please share them with us using the ‘Comments’ option below.

We are also constantly looking for participants in our user studies. If you would like to influence the Yahoo! user experience by sharing your opinions and feedback, sign up to participate in user studies based in India or the U.S.

Devika Ganapathy
User Experience Researcher – Yahoo! India Insights

As we mentioned, we now feature slideshows as a part of Yahoo! Image Search results with a cool “theater mode” experience for you to sit back and enjoy images. You will see collections of top images from all of Yahoo!’s great content sites packaged as slideshows on various relevant topics. We are also showcasing sets of great public imagery from Flickr to provide you the best collection of images on the web.

Also, with our new “Facebook Album Search beta” feature, you can now find public albums from the friends and family you’re connected to on Facebook (after you have linked your Yahoo! and Facebook accounts).

So next time you want to see the latest images for Paris, you might see beautiful images from across the Web, but at the bottom of the Yahoo Image Search results page you’ll see a module with public images uploaded by your friends to their Facebook albums.

This is just the start of enhancements we plan to bring you on Yahoo! Search. So stay tuned for lots of exciting stuff coming your way.

Anuj Sahai
Product Manager, Multimedia Search

With both video and image search, we are featuring up to five pages of topics that are trending in search. You can scroll through the pages or turn on autoscroll to watch the search trends of the moment.

Find today’s top trending image searches on the Yahoo! Image search home page:

Or go to the Yahoo! Video search home page and see the latest trends in video:

Already, we’ve seen double-digit percentage increases in engagement for both image and video search since launching these new homepages, with a 60% increase in time spent on the image search homepage.

Now you have another way to get a quick picture of what’s happening around the search world, from World Cup to Dancing with the Stars. This is just the start of a set of changes we’ll be making to help you find the information you’re looking for. So come back to Yahoo! Image and Video Search often and see what we’re up to.

Anuj Sahai and Sriram J. Sathish (Thiru)
Yahoo! Image Search

Our brilliant scientists are working hard behind the scenes to uncover the relevant details and content hidden in the billions of pages on the Web. What this means is that we can surface the nuggets scattered across what we call the “Web of Things” to show you the stuff that matters to you, right on your Search results page. Our aim is to save you many clicks and a lot of time, while creating a fun way to conduct searches for related topics of interest.

For entertainment junkies, there is all kinds of great information we can find for you in our rich Search results. For example, if you’re a TV fan looking for details on your favorite show we just launched a new TV shortcut that will display the latest video clips, bonus videos (or even entire episodes), episodes list, ratings, show times from Yahoo! TV, and photos – all with just one click from the Search results page.

On the left side of the page, we show suggestions of related celebrities, movies or TV shows related to your entertainment queries. Check out the search results for “Days of our Lives” actor Jensen Ackles. If you click on Ackles’ result, we’ll show you a brand new rich shortcut with photos, videos and tweets about him. Plus you’ll get new suggestions to explore more Search results for his co-stars, like Jessica Alba and Orlando Bloom, or some of the movies he’s been in.

Click on Orlando Bloom and you’ll see that the new Celebrity shortcut brings up news, along with his photos, videos and tweets.

So go on and search for your favorite entertainment topics on Yahoo! We are curious to know what you think!

P.S. If your favorite celebrity has an official Twitter feed, you can see their tweets right on the search results page! This way, you won’t miss a minute of their lives.

P.P.S. We’re also now showing enhanced shortcuts for a broader range of movies and music to include even more of your favorite stuff. Take a look at our search results for music artist Tommy Emmanuel or the movie Pretty Woman.

Alexandra Levich and Yuko Kamae

Yahoo! Search

On Yahoo! Image Search, just search for “Oscars 2010” and you’ll see our Oscars image carousel, with the latest image search results of the nominees and photos of the event. While counting down to the big night, you can easily search for snapshots from the film Inglourious Basterds or photos of nominees like Meryl Streep. You’ll see Oscars-related image results for these films and actors in the Oscars image refiner on the left hand side of the page. On Oscar night, use Yahoo! Image Search to see Penelope Cruz’s gown, George Clooney’s always-dapper suit, and other best- and worst-dressed celebs as they make their way down the red carpet.

This year, we are also giving you a quick and easy way to see the list of nominees and winners from the Web search results page. To see the nominees, just search for “Oscars” or “Academy Awards” on Yahoo! Search and you’ll see a list of nomination categories for the awards. Simply click any of the categories to see the full list of nominees.  We’ll be updating the results as soon as the winners are announced on Sunday night, so you can use the same queries and see the list of winners directly on the search results page.

Want more? We have video coverage of the Oscars too! If you didn’t catch the nominated flicks in the theater, check out the trailers of the nominated films on Yahoo! Video Search. Search for “Oscars” on Yahoo! Video Search and you’ll see that we’ve categorized the trailers on the left hand side of the page by award categories, actor interviews, speeches, and more. After the Oscars, search for the names of the winners to find updates results.

With these new ways of exploring the Academy Awards, we hope you enjoy your “front row” access to the Oscars coverage from beginning to end!

Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Image Search, and Yahoo! Video Search Teams

Starting today, you can easily dive into albums and songs by your favorite music artist in Yahoo! Video Search. We have hooked into the “Web of Things” to intelligently extract the most popular albums and songs for artist or band queries. This feature lets you explore music artists intuitively and easily.

For instance, say you are looking for music videos from U2. The new video search music refiner on the left rail shows popular albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and top songs, such as “Beautiful Day.”

Click on an album or song, and Yahoo! Video Search shows videos for the album or song in an overlay page.

For example, when you click on The Joshua Tree on the left rail, you will see videos of the album’s tops songs, including “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You.”

This is a great way to watch popular song videos from an album without losing the context of your original query.

For the video search music refiner, we tapped further into the Web of Things to give you a more personally relevant search experience. You’ve seen the image search travel refiner and the celebrity refiner – now you can give the video search music refiner a try.

Manish Sharma and Ishwar Sridharan

Yahoo! Video Search