Application Specific Search

A number of people commented to me the other day that Yahoo! had begun to integrate Flickr into their core image search service. So now you do an image search in Yahoo! and you’ll get some Flickr photos.

Thomas Hawk, the king of Flickr in my mind, pointed it out to me first and he blogged about it as well. He says that there are only five search terms that result in Flickr photos and you only get four Flickr photos returned for any phrase.

I honestly couldn’t care less because I have Flickr as one of the search options in my Firefox search field. I blogged about this a couple months ago in my "fragmentation of search" post.

Whenever I need an image from the web (and I need one at least once a day for this blog), I simply search Flickr. I never search the web for images at Google or Yahoo! anymore. I get better photos and a better experience at Flickr.

So while it’s nice to see Yahoo! finally integrating Flickr photos into search, they are doing it in a really lame way in my opinion, and it’s already way too late to be of interest to me.