Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Yahoo has added a filter for finding public domain photographs in image search. This is a huge step forward, as people in the past have often believed (incorrectly) that any image available from search results is free for the taking. This just isn’t so, so beware of running an image search and snagging a pic to adorn your website or blog!

Truth of that matter – most images online are still the property of the photographer or artist, and you simply are not allowed to use them without his or her permission. There are rare exceptions when the images are very old or there is a licence that allows for this kind of use, but sometimes this is not readily apparent.

Creative Commons (CC) has provided the most popular way of tagging images for public use. I always turned to Flickr’s advanced search to find CC images, but with the major search engines adding this to their own search functionality, I won’t have to log onto Flickr and weed through pages and pages every time I need a good image.

Yahoo! added a “Creator allows reuse” filter last month. Now if you go to Yahoo! Image Search, you can search for a motive (like, say, Old Faithful) and then click on “More filters”.

You can tick the box for “Creator allows reuse” and then select either “Commercial use” and/or “Remix, tweak, build upon”, depending on your need. When you click on any of the images found in the resulting array, Yahoo! will add information telling you just how much the photographer allows their work to be exploited for commercial and other types of reuse.

You’ll still be using images from Flickr, just supported by Yahoo’s search technology (apparently Flickr is the only serviceallowing for this kind of systematic tagging that is big enough to bother with.)

Also, if your a bit of a geek, you can tweak search parameters to filter out images in the public domain, according to Search Engine Land:

Public Domain Images: Add &as_rights=cc_publicdomain to the URL

Creative Commons Attribution Images: Add &as_rights=cc_attribute to the URL

Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Images: Add &as_rights=cc_sharealike to the URL

Hopefully this indicates that Google is testing a similar filter and will add it to their advanced search options soon. So far, MSN’s Bing has no image search with a like filter.

After a failed series of talks in 2008, the Yahoo and Microsoft may be back in the conference room together, Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz confirmed at an on-stage interview at D: All Things Digital.

Bartz said she was talking to Microsoft, but the Yahoo CEO indicated that it was no big deal when asked what level the talks were up to, saying “Yeah, a little bit.” How advanced the negotiations between the two companies might be is up in the air – there may not even be proper ‘negotiations’ at all at this point, but just the confirmation of discussion has rumors flying..

Bartz became CEO of Yahoo in mid-January 2009, after Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang turned down Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid of $31 per share made on February 1, 2008. By July 2008, Microsoft had completely retired its initial offer of $44.6 billion in cash and stock for Yahoo, stating that it would grow its search engine organically instead. Yahoo stock plummeted, the company was nearly the victim of a hostile takeover, and Yang was out.

Bartz did say that she would like to sell Yahoo Search to Microsoft. No figures were revealed, but Yahoo’s CEO indicate that Microsoft would need a significant offer on the table in order to acquire Yahoo Search as well as the “right technology,” and willingness to provide Yahoo with the “right data.”

In other news, Microsoft has been test driving the next step for Live Search, Kumo, with an eye to a release under the brand name Bing. So far the Redmond company is keeping mum on its stand in regard to Yahoo.

According to the Yahoo Search blog, since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, impressive strides have been made for both applications. BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is currently live in 23 markets around the world.

SearchMonkey has a most impressive rack record, with a staggering 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results viewed by users every day. Site owners have seen a more than 15% increase when testing SearchMonkey results over non SearchMonkey results. 200 people enter the developer tool and start creating an application each day, 15,000 plus developers have registered to build applications, and have over 400 applications available for use in galleries. Moreover, RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October, 2008.

As for BOSS, there have been key updates which have allowed developers to monetize through third-party platforms. There is also access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is expected to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, not including the volume from traditional Yahoo Search syndication. This is over triple the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft (according to comScore qSearch April 2009).

Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search, says:

In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the Yahoo! Search results page. With BOSS, you can look forward to more specialized searches that will help consumers reach their content more easily than ever. We want to extend our thanks to the developer communities within both SearchMonkey and BOSS and to partners including Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn, for joining us in our efforts to make search richer and more open, and for helping us reach these milestones.

YouTube and Google Video may have some competition. Flickr Video has been largely unnoticed, overshadowed by the popular Flickr photo sharing site. Flickr Video was until recently limited to the use of Flickr PRO account holders, but now Yahoo is rolling out some new features for Flickr Video in the hopes of expanding sue of and bringing attention to the service. Flickr Video is now open to free Flickr members. Free members can upload two videos per month. The 90 seconds video time limit or the not bigger than 150MB video size is still in effect, however.

Flickr Video is also rolling out HD Video upload capabilities to compete with YouTube’s HD video capability. HD video is uploadable by paid members, but free members can participate in viewing these HD videos. The restriction probably has something to do with server issues as HD Videos take up bigger server space than regular quality videos.

Another new feature is Flickr Clock, which is like a timeline for videos. Flickr video uploaders can upload their videos and the service will categorize and display these videos based on the time they were taken. The objective is to capture different happenings across the globe at a specific time period. The Flickr Clock works out as a pretty nifty visualization tool.

The Flickr blog also mentioned something about removing the set limit for free members, but it is not clear if it is the limit for photo sets or video sets. With the new platform, Flickr will probably become more utilized by Flickr fans, but YouTube is not likely to be in any danger.

Yahoo has started integrating imagery in its search result ads. If you search fro certain brand names, you’ll see a video thumbnail inviting you to play a video or an image with a link to the site. Yahoo is calling this Rich Ads, according to the New York Times, which quotes Yahoo’s Tim Mayer saying this “moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers”

The NYT writes “Yahoo is charging a monthly fee for the service, versus the auction-based pricing of search advertising, which Mr. Mayer said Yahoo might use in the future.” For now “only certain large, brand-focused advertisers” (like SoBe, Pepsi, Pedigree and Home Depot) are part of the program.

This is part of Yahoo’s ‘rich search’ initiative, which will be available to big name brands to allow commercials to actually be accessible from the SERPs. Yahoo is test driving a new pricing strategy in which the only available keywords are branded ones, letting brands dominate the top of the search reply page. Pricing is a monthly flat fee determined by a combination of the advertiser’s industry vertical and their past performance. Yahoo is also considering flat-fee pricing across standard search advertising, breaking with bid and quality management.

Google hasn’t jumped on the video train full fledged (perhaps being too busy monetizing video through YouTube); so far all they have offered in their search results are image ads in image search results, banners for one of the Bourne movies which was not disclosed as a promotion in the beginning, plus boxes which expand images, search results with non-ad graphics in main Google results and special holiday decorations around ads that are only shown at specific times of the year.

Will this allow Yahoo to take the lead? Probably not. It should, however, spur the ever competitive Google to step up to the plate and add thumbnail video to its own results.