One of the annoyances of doing image search on Yahoo and Google is the way they’ve both handled image previews. Up until now, when you clicked on a thumbnail image after doing a search, both engines took you to a preview page showing a larger version of the image in a pane at the top and the original Website it appears in below. Like many other frustrated image searchers, I find myself constantly toggling back and forth between the preview page and the original search results page to look for a better image.
Today, Yahoo is taking a few steps to improve this experience by taking a few steps out of it. Instead of showing a lone image in the preview pane, it is expanding the pane and filling up that real estate with a larger preview of the image, more image results, and image search box. Search assist also works in the search box so that when you start typing you get related keywords tuned to image search. (See illustration below).
If you search for rain, for instance, and then click on one of the image results, you will see the new preview pane at the top
The original page is still shown in the bottom pane for context (and you can always remove the Yahoo overlay altogether), but you can also continue your search without going back to the full results page. That should help speed things up, which is always a good thing.
I like the idea, but it could be a little more streamlined yet. http://www.searchme.com has a similar ‘preview’ and is all in Flash and is very smooth.
I also prefer to see the image first not the web site. If I’m looking for an image – like a picture of a spider – I don’t need to see the web site at that point, just the image that I need/want.
MY last “complaint” is the size of the bar. I’m on a 21″ monitor with a resolution of 1680×1050 and the bar takes at least 1/4 of the page. Be nice if they could slim it down a bit.
All in all I like the idea and the direction. I hope they keep developing.
It’s usability issues like these that Yahoo can chip away at Google with if they really keep up with it.
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So yahoo has to index 2 resolutions of each image?? This may also raise copyright problems which google is cleverly avoiding with low resolution images.
This is not the direction of image search. Roadmap would be to avoiding duplicate images in search results or grouping similar looking images, relevancy, etc.
Oops .. I misspoke about searchme.com – they don’t do anything of the sort – forget I said anything.
searchme.com might not. But Korean search engine Naver.com does do what you say, a flash-based sidebar that dynamically loads more results as you scroll down.
It’s very slick.
Link for those who want to check it out but don’t read Korean (search is for “rain”):
http://imagesea...re=878168567750
I have been waiting for that update for a while!
hey dats really cool… it does save a lot of time. small but useful
Erick how come u r not mentioning “Sponsored Results” in the image search … i have never seen that before in yahoo or google.
Nice change, after a long time of no changes in this area.
If you want a really good image search, see http://www.ginipic.com
That is very very very slick! Yahoo should buy them out.
Thanks for the tip Frodo!
is there any relation with photo senthetic from microsoft?
Note that Live Search (http://images.live.com) has kept the search results on the left hand side for a while now.
Say what you will about Live Search – but they way their Image Search works is great.
Try Search 2.0 http://search.mazic.in/
not another search federator … try yahoo glue page
Awesome…
Good to see Y! pushing something to the world…
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http://good-mov...ws.blogspot.com
My favorite way to search for images is with Firefox and the cooliris extension. Many images fast and you can browse them all very quickly.
Yahoo trying to play catch up to Live’s Image search usability? Live has had this kind of functionality (albeit with a horizontal screen split) for a while now.
The time for looking only in one search source is gone, I’m using Ginipic where I can search all the sources together (Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Live and much more) and see & use all the results in a great interface.
Thanks for the ginipic link! It’s really awesome. Exactly what I was looking for and was missing from the scene. How come I never heard of it…?
“How come I never heard of it…?”
Eh? So your Gary self didn’t tell your Alex self about the company that you work for?
wooooeeewwww !!!! nice advertisement platform for u guys ….. oooo GINIPIC
why i would download dat
Gee wizz, ginipic is like the totally best thing ever. I don’t know why a large company doesn’t give them lots of money!
Seriously, it looks like the people behind ginipic.com are just spamming the comments.
“If you want a really good image search, see http://www.ginipic.com”
“That is very very very slick! Yahoo should buy them out.”
“The time for looking only in one search source is gone, I’m using Ginipic where I can search all the sources together (Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Live and much more) and see & use all the results in a great interface.”
“Thanks for the ginipic link! It’s really awesome. Exactly what I was looking for and was missing from the scene. How come I never heard of it…?”
Good to see yahoo still fighting.
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
I wonder if they are using the ESP game that Luis Von implemented. Google had purchased this technology, but it is a fun game that has real people competing to tag images since computers can’t recognize images the way humans can. Check it out – http://www.gwap...review/espgame/. Luis also invented the captcha and now the recaptcha which now helps to digitize books.
Why don’t they just buy CoolIris and integrate their technology into yahoo search? CoolIris outperforms both Yahoo and Google in terms and showing image search results just the way we want it…
When I do an image search on Yahoo I get mostly results from flickr. This makes the results seem biased even if it’s possibly because they have a better index of flickr photos.
Good move, but google still fairs better