An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

Send your tips to gostips@gmail.com.

March 4, 2007

Yahoo Image Search Shows Recommendations

Yahoo seems to try anything to entice users to use Yahoo search as much as possible. They display anything from popular to related queries on their homepage, in ads, and in many other places.

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.


I've also noticed that Yahoo continues to show way too many adult images for queries that shouldn't trigger anything sexual (like Hotmail).

The idea of representing words or expressions with images is interesting and search engines should experiment more with showing images as answers for some queries. But the recommendations should be filtered for irrelevant queries, because popular searches like "funny" or "Britney Spears" tend to show up often just because they're popular.

{ Thank you, Ron Wilson. }

3 comments:

  1. Showing too much adult imagery could be a strategy, too, I think. I guess that Yahoo would be able to filter out adult stuff quite easily...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think Yahoo purposely has the adult. Like with Yahoo video, it has the adult stuff showing up, while Google video has none. They probably figured they just had to grab whatever users they could.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The amount of adult stuff in non-adult queries is just ridiculous with Yahoo. Even if their strategy is to cater to adult searchers as well, there's absolutely no reason to display porn when you search for "hotmail", because no one searching for porn will look for "hotmail" (unless they have a *really* weird inbox fetish).

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.