Yahoo Image Search Testing Image Recommendations

By Loren Baker, Editor | March 5, 2007

According to the Google Operating System Blog, Yahoo Image Search is serving Image Search Recommendations at the bottom of its Image results pages.

Yahoo Image Search has a new feature that shows recommended queries at the bottom of each search results page. Yahoo looks at the most popular queries used by those who tried the current query. For MSN, the results were pretty good: Yahoo, Google, Hotmail and… funny, but I can’t say the same for the attached images.

Personally, I am not seeing this testing done by Yahoo Image Search this morning. After some preliminary image searches however, my recommendation to Yahoo would be to perfect your Image Search capability before recommending more irrelevant Image Search results to your users.

What Yahoo! is doing is a great idea, as it spreads search numbers and showcases Yahoo Search’s recommendation abilities, but if the results are completely irrelevant or offensive, then the intent is lost in the user experience.