Yahoo Search sucks up Flickr streams

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 28 June 2007 13:36

Your IT - Home IT

Yahoo Image Search now returns images stored in Flickr as well as those its spider discovers on the web.

"[W]e wanted to build a scalable integration that surfaced the freshest, most relevant content from Flickr," said Ujwal Tickoo, senior product manager at Yahoo Search, so "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."

Given that thousands of images may be uploaded by Flickr users in one minute, this approach will clearly give more up to date results than crawling a web site.

Flickr images are credited as being "By <membername> on Flickr", with a hyperlink to that person's public photo stream. Some Flickr users have complained that while Flickr offers a 'hide images from public searches' option, there is no provision for them to specify the terms under which a public photo may be used, and this could result in even more widespread copyright infringement.