Tech Shout!

Yahoo has announced that it has begun to integrate Flickr photos into its search result pages, allowing users to search through Flickr’s vast collection of user-submitted images. As of now, the service is limited to a select number of keywords. But Yahoo plans to expand the program in the future.

A search of “interesting photos” shows results of images ranging from artistic photography to extreme close-ups of beautiful flora and fauna. While a search for “funny photos” would bring up images that the Fickr community has tagged as having a humorous edge.

Last year in March, the Sunnyvale, Calif. Based search company bought the social photography site Flickr. Social networking has become a real hot commodity for big Internet corporations, with many making acquisitions of their own.

“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,” Yahoo! Search’s Lingxian Ding said of the new service.

The Yahoo! Photos site is much larger than Flickr, but its users are just getting introduced to the idea of sharing their photos with the world. However, Flickr users are very accustomed to this and tend to post edgier photos. Yahoo! Is clearly looking to Flickr for quality and not quantity. Traditional image searches usually bring up loads of low quality a photo that are only marginally related to your search term- but, that’s not the case with Flickr.

This may be a very limited trial, but Yahoo will surely expand the integration across more search results in time.