Application Specific Search

A number of people commented to me the other day that Yahoo! had begun to integrate Flickr into their core image search service. So now you do an image search in Yahoo! and you'll get some Flickr photos.

Thomas Hawk, the king of Flickr in my mind, pointed it out to me first and he blogged about it as well. He says that there are only five search terms that result in Flickr photos and you only get four Flickr photos returned for any phrase.

I honestly couldn't care less because I have Flickr as one of the search options in my Firefox search field. I blogged about this a couple months ago in my "fragmentation of search" post.

Whenever I need an image from the web (and I need one at least once a day for this blog), I simply search Flickr. I never search the web for images at Google or Yahoo! anymore. I get better photos and a better experience at Flickr.

So while it's nice to see Yahoo! finally integrating Flickr photos into search, they are doing it in a really lame way in my opinion, and it's already way too late to be of interest to me.

Comments

[Thomas Hawk]

Fred, I think you are right about 20 images from Flickr integrated into Yahoo! Web Search not being that big of a deal.

But... it is still a symbolic move in my opinion and I think this is important.

Certainly I'd think both Yahoo and Flickr would want to integrate into Yahoo! Web Search. As you cite, searching for an image based on interestingness is so far, far, superior to the results that Yahoo Image Search or Google Image Search fetch back. You already use it as your default. But you're saavy and an early adopter and all and the rest of middle America isn't there yet.

But I think that Flickr's been holding this back more than anything. I think Flickr is worried that their community will not approve of a mass indexing of Flickr images into Yahoo Image Search and I think that this first step is to gauge the community response to a symbolic first step.

Stewart Butterfield has mentioned that they want to have a tool to let people opt out of search indexing (which they now have) and I suspect it's just a matter of time at this point until you see much broader integration beyond 20 images integrates in.

Integrating Flickr into Yahoo Search I'm sure has very much been the plan all along though. Afterall it was Yahoo's research and search world that bought Flickr in the first place.

I think this is exciting.

It is of course interesting too that this largely symbolic search integration was released on the same day that a very visible thread was started at Flickr Central titled Is Google penalzing Flickr http://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594249554004/ -- interestingly enough a thread that was based on a conversation that Scoble and I had on a photoshoot we did together on Monday.