And beyond saving people the effort of so much typing, many visual concepts genuinely defy accurate description. Text querying is a necessary feature of a photo search engine, but, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Photo search usually matches across modalities: text to image. That is, the query is in the same modality-text-as the documents being searched. Second, in traditional web search, the goal is usually to match documents to a set of keywords in the query. For instance, our color search feature, which allows filtering by color scheme, and our style filters, which allow filtering by styles such as “minimalist” or “patterns,” encourage exploration. We have taken this to heart throughout Flickr.

First, the goal of web search is usually to satisfy a particular information need, while with photo search the goal is often one of discovery as such, it should be delightful as well as functional. In many ways, photo search is very different from traditional web or text search. If you hover over a photo on a search result page, you will reveal a “…” button that exposes a menu that gives you the option to search for photos similar to the photo you are currently viewing. To further that effort, today we are introducing similarity search on Flickr. At Flickr, we understand that the value in our image corpus is only unlocked when our members can find photos and photographers that inspire them, so we strive to enable the discovery and appreciation of new photos.

Flickr search