August 5, 2009

Flickr Updates Design of Search Results

Yahoo! owned Flickr has given a makeover to its search results page. Now, instead of scrolling through a single stream of images, you see a grid.

You can filter by size by checking your selection at the top right of the results. Also, mouseover a single result and look for an "i" in the lower right corner. Click on it for more information about the image.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 2:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 24, 2009

Yahoo! Launches Travel Refiner for Image Search

If you're searching for images of locations around the world, Yahoo! has a new feature to assist you in your effort. Now, when you search for locations, a sidebar will appear on the left that has narrowed-down categories.

For example, if you're searching for images of Miami, FL, Yahoo! offers up options to refine your search by Port of Miami, the University of Miami, Miami Heat, etc.

Check it out:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

May 27, 2009

Yahoo! Image Search Launches Creative Commons Filter

If you need to find photos or graphics that have less restrictions than a fully copyrighted image, Yahoo! is making that easier with a new Creative Commons filter on its image search. Creative Commons does not mean the creator signs away all rights on their content, but they do open it up to greater use.

For example, bloggers flock to Flickr for Creative Commons images that they can use freely on their blogs to complement their writing. Usually all that's needed is a simple attribution to the user who uploaded the image to Flickr.

Of course, Flickr, which Yahoo! acquired in 2005, isn't the only place Creative Commons images can be found. That's why it's nice to have a filter on a broader image search.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 6, 2009

Yahoo! Image Search Update Reminiscent of Visual Search Engines

Visual search engines such as Searchme and Viewzi provide searchers with a graphical preview of web sites, video, and images. In its image search update, Yahoo! appears to be taking a page from these visual search engines by offering a preview page when users click on an image.

Yahoo! says the update also includes the following three features:

A search box with search assistance to let you quickly and easily search for more images.
More image search results (so you don't have to hit the back button to see your other options).
Suggestions based on queries from other users making similar searches.

Here's are screenshots from the update. Let us know your reaction to the update in the comments!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 6:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 4, 2008

Yahoo Adds Search Assist to Image Search

Yahoo has added Search Assist to their image search. If you're not aware, Search Assist is Yahoo's technology that brings up search suggestions when you start typing in your search.

Here's what it looks like for an initial search:

But Yahoo has added a second tier to Search Assist for Image Search. On a results page, if you click in the search box, you'll get the search suggestions plus image suggestions.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 16, 2007

Thanksgiving Turkey, Image Search, and Missed Opportunities

Thanksgiving is a major holiday for my family. With the first changes of color in the foliage, I begin the counting the weeks until the family gathers at my cousin's for this event. So, with Thanksgiving less than a week away, I decided to share my mounting enthusiasm with one of my siblings by sending a note with a picture of what I hoped would be a gorgeous roasted turkey. I fully expected that finding such an image would be as simple as firing up my browser turning to either Google or Yahoo image search and selecting a choice roasted turkey. To my surprise this was not to be.

Here is what I found when I went turkey tracking. An image search for “turkey” at both Google and Yahoo! yielded differing, but unsatisfactory results. Google's included live turkeys, some turkey humor, maps and images of the country Turkey, but no succulent roast turkeys on page 1. On page 1 of the image search results Yahoo! had a number of live gobblers, no maps, some images of Turkey and Turkish people, and lone image of a roast turkey – not quite what I had in mind. Both search engines suggested that I narrow my search to include “Thanksgiving turkey.” I took the suggestion, and the results were somewhat better. Google offered up more turkey clip art and a few images of roasted turkeys. Yahoo! had similar results.

As I reviewed the results, I got to thinking – a dangerous activity – where are the large purveyors of turkeys? Why are there no images from Butterball or Perdue, two large poultry producers or even the food magazines that every year have many gorgeous images of roasted turkeys within their covers? I thought initially that my mistake was not searching correctly so I gave image search another try using “butterball turkey” and “perdue turkey.”

Now we're cooking, I thought. The results in Yahoo! for “butterball turkey” were short on images of cooked turkeys, long on displays of the logo. There were also disturbing images of maimed and dead (not in grocery settings) turkeys and images chronicling a turkey “offal to oil” initiative. With Yahoo! it wasn't until the second page of results that a search for “butterball” turkey yielded a beautiful cooked turkey.

A search for “perdue turkey netted on Google netted a wide variety of images including some appetizing pictures of turkey sandwiches. On Yahoo! the results were startling, for I could have filled a grocery bag with raw turkey parts in neat packages, but no beauty shots of roast turkey.

Still not satisfied, I made one last try using “roast turkey” as my image search term. Google offered up lots of images of roasted turkeys, but curiously not a single one on the first page was from a turkey producer or packer. On Yahoo! there were lots of roasted turkeys some with a more homey touch since they were from Flickr, but again not a single one on the first page from a turkey producer.

Just to get a rounded picture I searched for “thanksgiving turkey” in the main “web results” pages for Yahoo! and Google. Lo and behold, Google offered a lovely cooked turkey, from a family advice site, not a turkey producer. Yahoo! had turkey clip art but no roasted turkey.

Is this a missed opportunity? Surely, I am not the only person searching for a beauty shot of a roasted turkey? Were my searches that defective? My persistence at least should have been more easily rewarded. I even took the help that the search engines offered. I'm left with the conclusion that image search has been neglected. A visit to the turkey sites reveals very sophisticated marketing programs for assisting the consumer in preparing the ritual bird. There are hotlines, chat rooms and podcasts, but alas, lowly image search appears to be overlooked. With the advent of universal search, businesses must be found in all the right places. (Note: this is the title of the workshop that I will be giving at SES Chicago along with Greg Jarboe.)

Oh! When all was said and done, I decided not to send a beauty shot, but instead to go with the image of the roasted turkey in a bikini – an effect that can be achieved with creative use of foil and the tanning effects of oven roasting.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 4:25 PM | Permalink

November 24, 2006

Yahoo Image Search Bug Showed Sex Images For Innocent Search

Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, The Register reported that a search at Yahoo Images for franchise returned very offensive and disturbing images. I will not describe the images, but I saw them myself and as soon as I saw it, I emailed my contacts at Yahoo. Soon after the images were pulled from the search results. It seems to me that someone figured out a way to easily insert pornographic images into Yahoo images for a search term even with safe search on. The Register has blurred and censored screen captures of the first line of results.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:47 AM | Permalink

September 1, 2006

Google Images Labeler: Google's Challenge To Flickr?

Google Blogoscoped spotted the Google Image Labeler game, designed to help Google improve its image search results through tagging. It feels like a catch-up game with human-powered efforts that Yahoo is embracing via Flickr -- plus it also looks pretty influenced by the work of Luis von Ahn and his ESP Game.

The game pits you against someone else. If you see a picture of a car, and you both label it car, you can proceed to the next image. You continue until your time has run out. Here is an image of Horcrux and Barry Schwartz from our blog (rustybrick) scoring 300 points for matching tags on three images.

Image search has been tough for search engines. They can't easily tell what an image is about, since there's no good way to "see" the images and categorize them. Some technologies to recognize faces, colors, shapes, objects and other things are improving. Still, it's hard with an image of someone like Martha Stewart. Is she a woman, celebrity, criminal or just Martha Stewart? Or all of these? How do you know which one or ensure that all of them are applied.

Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz is probably one of the most famous converts from turning to human power over computer power. He's been cited many times as having originally sought a technological solution to understanding what's in video and image data, then moved to embrace people power. Here's one example of that from a Wired article last year:

Horowitz's favorite project is incorporating people-powered metadata systems from two other Yahoo! properties: the recommendation technology from Yahoo! Music and the tagging features from Flickr, the photoblogging company Yahoo! acquired this spring. Google's original stroke of genius was figuring out how to piggyback on human judgment by following the links people make between Web sites. Horowitz is borrowing functionality from two Yahoo! properties to develop something similar for video.

We've just seen Yahoo make more of a commitment to using that human power when it started inserting Flickr results, rather than Yahoo Image results (which are computer sorted), into regular web searches last week.

Google, of course, has no Flickr to use. Enter the game. It's designed to get lots of people to quickly label images because they want to have fun. If that concept sounds familiar, it's because that's exactly the method behind the ESP Game, created by Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn.

I first learned of Ahn's work through a 2003 Associated Press article, Researchers Hope to Improve Web Searches. His ESP Game came later. The Google system looks like a copy of it, perhaps with his cooperation. Perhaps he's even there now -- I'm checking. We know he was there just last month, because here's a video of his lecture on classifying images (well worth watching). That Martha Stewart example above? That came from his video. I've also embedded it below:

In his video, Ahn thinks that in two months, all images on Google Images could be labeled. It's not hard to believe after hearing that, Google jumped to try this.

Postscript: I heard back from Luis von Ahn, who sent me this:

Yes, Image Labeler is based on my ESP Game, which Google licensed. I'm not employed by Google, however, since I'm a full-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:43 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2006

Yahoo Search Integrates Flickr Images In Search Shortcuts

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have integrated Flickr images into their search results. So a search on funny photos or travel photography would pull images from Flickr and then take you to a tag search at Flickr, if you so request. But what about Yahoo Images? Well, they still come up for some searches, I happen to be looking for an Windows XP logo today, and I searched on xp logo at Yahoo and got Yahoo Image results at the top, some may not be that appropriate. Also, typically a search on photos at [keyword here] would bring back Yahoo Photo results.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:42 PM | Permalink

January 23, 2006

Some Advanced Search Syntax from Yahoo Hacks and the Launch of Rough Cuts from Safari Tech Books

The Yahoo Search team has allowed Paul Bausch, author of Yahoo Hacks, to share a couple of the many "hacks" from his book on the Yahoo Search Blog. The first edition of Yahoo Hacks was published in October.

In the post, Paul explains and offers examples of a couple of cool pieces of advanced search syntax (aka meta words) for Yahoo Image Search (width: and height:) that allow the searcher to specify the precise size of the image they're looking to find. Bausch also mentions aspect: for use with Yahoo Video Search, It lets the user specify the "aspect ratio" of the video material one hopes to find. Paul does a good job of explaining why this might be useful to a video searcher.

You can find a few more Yahoo Hacks here.

I also noticed that the full text of the book is accessible and searchable online via Safari Tech Books, an fee-based service that I've mentioned several times on the blog during the past year. Safari lets the user search and read hundreds if not thousands of full text books online. Unlike other services, there is no limit on how much one can read online. Btw, numerous libraries (public, academic, corporate) provide free access to Safari.

Safari is co-owned by O'Reilly and the Pearson Technology Group and contains books from many publishers. You can try the service for free for two weeks.

Postscript: While we're on the subject of Safari, they officially launched a new service today called "Rough Cuts." It allows users to access "sneak peeks" of new books before they're published either by reviewing them online or downloading as a PDF file.

Similar to the nightly build in a software project, the Rough Cuts PDF is updated every time the author and editor make changes as they progress toward the finished book. Using the Rough Cuts service?s built-in Notes feature, readers can send feedback, suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editor.

You can learn more here and see what books currently offer "Rough Cuts" on this page.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:50 PM | Permalink

November 4, 2005

Changes to Yahoo Video Search Page; Image Search Adds Results Page Refinements

Yahoo Video Search made a change last week that allows you to view your results in either a "grid" view or a "list" view which also offers some additional description/transcript info if available.

I've also started to notice that Yahoo is placing links to Yahoo Shortcuts on non-web search results pages. Here's an example of a video search for: "baseball" and on an image search results page for the search: Chicago. Finally, image search results pages now allow the searcher to refine their search after clicking the search button. Look for various refinements at the top of the page below the blue line. For example, by just clicking you can only show only small, black and white images. Since February, Yahoo Images has also allowed the searcher to create "transformed" image queries using natural language.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:34 PM | Permalink

September 12, 2005

Looking for Katrina Images On Google & Yahoo

Over the weekend I went searching for Hurricane Katrina imagery in the Google Images and Yahoo Images databases. It's been two weeks since the storm hit the now devastated gulf coast and I wanted to determine what a typical user might find when entering the simple but descriptive query [Hurricane Katrina] in the image search box at Google and Yahoo.

At Google Images only 36 images (I'm not kidding, are seen on the results pages (screen cap here) and the relevancy of a few of these images are questionable (they have nothing to do with the storm and the devastatlon it caused).

Btw, I ran the search several times over the weekend to make sure a technical error was causing so few images to appear.

Many of the images that Google does offer are charts and maps of the storm before it slammed into the gulf coast. If you're looking for imagery that illustrates the destruction Katrina caused, you'll find very few. I was surprised that with the tens of thousands of images found on the open web, I would have found more. Perhaps this exercise also gives us some idea about how often Google Images is updated?

How did Yahoo Images do with the Hurricane Katrina query?

MUCH better than Google.

The total estimated number of images for the [Hurricane Katrina] query at Yahoo Images is over 6,100 but that number means little since I was only able to view 531. That said, most -- but not all -- of these images have a direct relationship to the storm and its aftermath. You'll find images from various sources culled from the open web along with imagery available from Yahoo News.

One thing I was unable to find via in either Google Images or Yahoo Images was material from the FEMA Photo Library, U.S. Dept of Defense Image Collection, and other sources inclding Orbimage and DigitalGlobe. Of course, this once again illustrates why knowledge of specialized/fcoused databases is so important.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:59 AM | Permalink

Tara Gives Thumbs Up To Yahoo Images; Yotophoto For Copyright Free Images

Contemplating Yahoo Images and Google Images is a short item from Tara over at ResearchBuzz finding that in a search for [rss buttons], less is more. Yahoo had fewer results than Google but was more on target with what she wanted. Meanwhile, her Search Engine of Free, GNU FDL, Creative Commons Images looks at the new Yotophoto image search engine designed to give you images you can use without copyright worries.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:45 AM | Permalink

April 7, 2005

Browse Yahoo Images with First Floor Image Search; Lenssen Releases New Version of FindForward

Here's a neat and new image search/browse tool from a company called First Floor Software that uses the Yahoo Image Search API.

First Floor Image Search allows you search/browse (50 images at a time), increase/reduce and rotate images. It works with Firefox or IE.

Since we're on the Yahoo API beat... Philipp L. has just released a new version his FindForward search tool that displays the "Related Queries" (via the Yahoo API) to the right side of the organic search results. Lenssen also developed the Yahoo Auto-Linker that Danny blogged about last week.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:47 PM | Permalink

April 5, 2005

Google Images Wins Cherry Tomato Challenge For Attribute Indexing

Tim Bray tests whether Google, Yahoo and MSN image search services can find images that make use of keywords only within the the ALT and TITLE attributes of an image tag. Google is the only one that can. The Cherry-Tomato Challenge and A Cherry-Tomato Winner tells the story.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:48 PM | Permalink

February 23, 2005

Yahoo Increases Size of Image Database, New Features Added

Yahoo! has just announced an increase in size to their image database.

According to the company Yahoo! Images now contains more than 1.5 billion image files. This is the second publicly announced size increase to Yahoo Images in about 4 months. In October, Yahoo announced that their database had passed the one billion images mark. Earlier this month, Google announced that their image database contained more than 1.1 billion images. Let's see if Google makes another move soon. This is beginning to remind me of the jockeying that took place with web index size counts a few years ago.

Along with increasing the size of the image database, Yahoo! has made a couple of new features available to searchers.

Transformed Queries First, Yahoo Images now understands certain natural language "trigger" terms in an image search query to help focus the query without having to use the advanced search interface. Cool! For example, a search for "black and white pictures of New York" will return only black and white images. Here's another example: wallpaper images of sunsets. I haven't had much time to use this new feature but have found that it does work if your query includes: + color image(s) or picture(s0 of xxx Note: "images of xxx color" doesn't seem to work, the spelling colour does work, pic(s) will work instead of pictures + black and white image(s)/picture(s) of xxx Note: bw also appears to work + wallpaper image(s)/picture(s) of xxx + small image(s)/picture(s) of xxx + medium image(s)/picture(s) of xxx + large image(s)/picture(s) of xxx Inline Images Second, up to four images will now be displayed inline on web search results pages if certain words (aka shortcuts) are included in the query. For example: pictures of Golden Gate Bridge or images of tigers or photos of flowers. A direct link to find more images is also provided. Btw, I've noticed that "transformed" query language discussed earlier appears to work in the web search box.

Ask Jeeves has offered a Smart Search shortcut that provides inline images for over a year. Google also offers inline images on web serp for certain queries. Using a shortcut term like "images" or "pictures" does not automatically mean images will be visible on Google web serp. When terms like images or pictures are used in a query, a link to "try Google images" is included on the page.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:01 AM | Permalink

October 21, 2004

Yahoo Announces Size Increase to Image Database

Word from Yahoo this afternoon that they're announcing a size increase, what they're calling an upgrade, to Yahoo Image Search database. According to the company, the database now includes an index of more than 1 billion images.

I wouldn't be suprised to see Google increase the total listed at Google Images soon. According to the site, they now index more than 880 million images.

In the past we've seen one company publicly announce a size increase and another company follows in a few days or weeks. Publicly announced pages totals can be useful but are often nothing more than a marketing tool.

Relevant results are what counts!

That said, I've found Yahoo Images a quality search tool quite some time. I also liked (even when the text database had problems) the image database that AltaVista offered.

The Yahoo! Search Blog has more info. It points out a new "cleaner" layout to image search results pages and mentions that Yahoo Image Search results include content from other Yahoo media sites like Yahoo Movies and Yahoo News. Including material from other Yahoo sites was first introduced in April.

By the way, I'm often asked if it's possible to search for only news images on the web. The answer is yes using Yahoo News. After entering your search terms, select "News Photos" from the pull-down menu that's located next to the search box.

It would be useful if an option to limit to only news photos was also offered on the advanced search page at Yahoo Image Search.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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