Other Inks Like This
The Big EasyThe Last Ten Inks
Utata Ink IndexAll Inks : Archives
More Ink (Archives)Search Ink
Got Ink?
The Daily Ink is the voice of Utata. Yes, your voice, our voices ... all the voices. We'd be tickled pink if our members helped us define that voice. And this, Utatans, would be your chance to do that.
Suggest An InkUtata's Fair Use Policy
Utata.org may occasionally excerpt content or use small reproductions of protected images for the purposes of comment, criticism, or education. This use falls under the FAIR USE guidelines in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. We evaluate all fair-use situations on a case-by-case basis.
For more information on Fair UseSubscribe To Utata Ink
Yahoo! Search and The Power of Groups
Daily Ink
Stored in: Flickr News
Posted On: September 07 2006
By: Bryan Partington
Archival Photo
From the "We Should Have Reported on this a Long Time Ago, but Far More Important Features were Released" department...
Yahoo! recently started including flickr photos in its search results.
Sort of.
From the Yahoo! Search Blog..
Try searching for Funny Photos and you’ll find hilarious and wacky Flickr photos of animals, kids, and signs. Searching for things that people think are funny is a good example of a query where combining what the community knows (and tags) with what algorithms can compute can lead to better search results.
Other Yahoo! searches that will bring up flickr photos are Interesting Photos, Travel Photography, Nature Photography and Black and White Photography
if you're uncomfortable with your photos appearing in Yahoo! in this way, you can opt-out of API searches. Unfortunately this will also exclude you from other useful third party uses of the API, like Utata Projects.
An interesting aspect of this development is where on Flickr the photos are drawn from.
The sources for Interesting Photos and Funny Photos are predictable, the main explore rankings and and interestingness filtered tag results for "funny"
The source of the Black and White, Nature and Travel photos threw me for a loop.
They were being drawn directly from flickr groups! B&W, Nature Photography and Travel Photography, to be percise.
With all the foofaraw surrounding the 2.0ish power of Tags and Interestingness, most of the photos that Yahoo! are pulling come out of human edited group pools, with no tags or interestingness involved whatsoever.
Thinking about it a bit, it is an excellent choice. Tags are messy and gameable, while interestingness favours a stagnant hierarchical list that wouldn't add much variety to the search results over time. Groups pools are about the now, of high quality and routinely human edited.
I'm not sure that using group pools in this would be able to scale across a broader range of search queries, and flickr would probably want to develop a 'recently interesting' tag search to fill this role. Still, interesting to contemplate the important role that groups can play in assuring quality and freshness, and how flickr and Yahoo! might best tap that resource.
Otherwise, in Flickr News:
- Previously: Geotagging Hints and Tips
- Next: MySpace Cuts Off Nose to Spite Face
Utata Ink is a daily publication edited by Bryan Partington (striatic). Photos used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and obtained via the flickr API unless otherwise noted. To make a contribution to Ink, please visit Ink Me.
