Flickr-izing Image 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 TickooYahoo! Search, Sr. Product Manager