Yahoo Image Search Up To 1.5 Billion Images
Yahoo has announced a big update to its image search, with 1.5 billion images indexed and new search operator options. According to Search Engine Watch, in October, Yahoo announced the index had reached 1 billion, representing a 50% increase in just four months. This pulls them ahead of Google Images announced 1.1 billion and, if I’m not mistaken, back into the lead.
More interestingly, Yahoo Image Search now understands natural language queries. You can type something like “black and white pictures of New York” and Yahoo Images knows to return exactly that. Other operators that work: “wallpaper images”, “small images”, “medium images”, “large images” and “color images”. You can replace the word “images” with “pictures”, “pics” or “photos”, or “color” with “colour”. Also, Yahoo now offers up to four inline images in its search results, but only if the query has the word “images”, “pics”, “photos”, “pictures” or “wallpaper” in it. Google also has inline images, but they appear only on some queries, and the user cannot trigger them with certain words.
I think the natural language queries are great. I want to see some engines use this more. Maybe you could type in “world trade center on nytimes.com” and get site search, or “news stories about disney” and get news search. That would be very, very useful.
(via Google Blogoscoped)
Great job guys…
Comment by hugiet | June 12, 2006