What is the second most important category to Google after its main search engine?
Hitwise says it’s image search.
So, don’t miss this announcement about Flickr photos getting integrated into Yahoo Image Search.
It’s surprising to me that Google continues to let Flickr run away with the metadata. What is the meta data? Well, Thomas Hawk, my photographic partner at PodTech, does a good job of explaining how the social features in Flickr give photos on Flickr more metadata which makes building a better image search possible.
Personally I’ve done a lot of testing of image search cause my Microsoft friends keep telling me “look at us, look at us” and I want to believe that Microsoft has its act together somewhere. But Flickr’s image search always pulls back better images for me than Ask, Live, or Google’s image search, for that matter.
The one reason I think Google hasn’t bought more companies like Photobucket, Zooomr, Piczo, etc. is that the Picasa team at Google thinks they can solve it some other way. I don’t believe them and they should reevaluate their strategy of not investing in a real social image service. Their tactic of letting people add tags to images isn’t working as well as Flickr (and won’t).
Anyway, Thomas Hawk does a variety of searches on a variety of image search engines to demonstrate that Yahoo is running away from the pack in this area.
What do you think? Are you going to change where you search for images because of this new announcement?
Scobleizer 
“Personally I’ve done a lot of testing of image search cause my Microsoft friends keep telling me “look at us, look at us””
Wasn’t Macrosoft going to integrate the Mozilla Seadragon OpenGL tech into the image search?
The one they renamed photosynthesis or plant-map or something?
That never materialized did it?
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“Personally I’ve done a lot of testing of image search cause my Microsoft friends keep telling me “look at us, look at us””
Wasn’t Macrosoft going to integrate the Mozilla Seadragon OpenGL tech into the image search?
The one they renamed photosynthesis or plant-map or something?
That never materialized did it?
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I like the changes to the Yahoo search. I’ll probably be using this instead of Google Image Search for now.
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I like the changes to the Yahoo search. I’ll probably be using this instead of Google Image Search for now.
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The difference between Flickr and google images is that Flickr is a concentrated pool of actual photos that someone took the time to upload and catalog in some fashion. Google is an index of whatever images it happens to run across on the web. You can’t even compare the two.
It is nice to know that the 3 people that still use Yahoo for search are going to get better results though.
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The difference between Flickr and google images is that Flickr is a concentrated pool of actual photos that someone took the time to upload and catalog in some fashion. Google is an index of whatever images it happens to run across on the web. You can’t even compare the two.
It is nice to know that the 3 people that still use Yahoo for search are going to get better results though.
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“Google is an index of whatever images it happens to run across on the web. You can’t even compare the two.”
Copy Flickr, make it unsearchable/spiderable
http://picasa.google.com Picasa Web Albums
Copy MySpace, make IT unsearchable/spiderable
http://www.orkut.com Orkut Social Networking
For a site that raped the web and sold it by the pound, they sure are just a little greedy with their implementations/clones. Google has the goods, and they’re not sharing. Do no evil.
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“Google is an index of whatever images it happens to run across on the web. You can’t even compare the two.”
Copy Flickr, make it unsearchable/spiderable
http://picasa.google.com Picasa Web Albums
Copy MySpace, make IT unsearchable/spiderable
http://www.orkut.com Orkut Social Networking
For a site that raped the web and sold it by the pound, they sure are just a little greedy with their implementations/clones. Google has the goods, and they’re not sharing. Do no evil.
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I use the search within Flickr itself regularly as it is the best source of Creative Commons by-sa pictures which are perfect for blogging. I think the best thing Flickr ever did was make this the default licence for all photos.
No other source comes close in my opinion, especially if you search by “interesting” rather than “relevant”. It’s amazing what turns up.
Picasaweb doesn’t even come close. It’s great for photo galleries (I use it to share photos of my son with my extended family) but as a resource it is quite limited.
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I use the search within Flickr itself regularly as it is the best source of Creative Commons by-sa pictures which are perfect for blogging. I think the best thing Flickr ever did was make this the default licence for all photos.
No other source comes close in my opinion, especially if you search by “interesting” rather than “relevant”. It’s amazing what turns up.
Picasaweb doesn’t even come close. It’s great for photo galleries (I use it to share photos of my son with my extended family) but as a resource it is quite limited.
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Robert,
Thanks for the heads up and the links. Thomas always has something insightful to add.
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Robert,
Thanks for the heads up and the links. Thomas always has something insightful to add.
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“What do you think? Are you going to change where you search for images because of this new announcement?”
Actually, yes, yes I am. I have to say that today marks the first time I’ve ever used Yahoo Image Search, but I’ve pretty much always had a great experience finding relevant photos on Flickr. I’m sold.
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“What do you think? Are you going to change where you search for images because of this new announcement?”
Actually, yes, yes I am. I have to say that today marks the first time I’ve ever used Yahoo Image Search, but I’ve pretty much always had a great experience finding relevant photos on Flickr. I’m sold.
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I don’t only going to change the place where i search for image. I will now only use Yahoo! simply cause of the ground, google grown up to an all controlling company. I dont’ want to be spied by everything i do on the net. Google already knows to much about all its users.
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I don’t only going to change the place where i search for image. I will now only use Yahoo! simply cause of the ground, google grown up to an all controlling company. I dont’ want to be spied by everything i do on the net. Google already knows to much about all its users.
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