Yahoo unveiled major changes to its image search service this morning and the user experience is now better than Google Image Search. Google may have all kinds of special collections (like the new Life Magazine archives) but Yahoo’s image search is just more pleasing to use.
The new Yahoo! interface includes more recommended search queries for related images than Google, a next-image picking slideshow on each image’s page, and an easy direct link to the image itself. Unfortunately, there is not a filter by copyright conditions, which is a major shortcoming.
Google’s interface does not make it as easy to scan through multiple images as quickly, but both could use meaningful support for limiting searches to Creative Commons or public domain images. The new Yahoo! Image Search option of limiting to within or outside of Flickr isn’t really useful at all.
None the less, we’re impressed with this small change from the search giant and we expect that for casual image searching, Yahoo may now be the engine of choice for more people.
