Flickr - Yahoo Image Slaves!

I noticed something the other day while pondering my flickr stats (where I keep all my photos online)...it seemed a little strange to me that certain pictures of mine always got about 15 or 20 hits per day...the answer came when I noticed that you can dig deeper and check where these visitors are coming from - both on a day-by-day basis, and an all-time basis...it quickly became apparent that Yahoo has started sending an unusual number of visitors to my stream (traditionally it would be Flickr/Google Image searches)...

Suddenly everything became clear...Yahoo didn't buy "Flickr"...what they had set firmly in their sights was the enormous army of disciplined photographers, who (without being paid a penny) wander the earth, frenziedly taking the best pictures they can, clean and tidy them (some even photoshopping), sort them for excellence, tag them, title them, geotag them and then (as a whole) self-sort them into the best the collective can produce for each topic...and us Flickr users actually pay for the pleasure of doing all this...

The end result is poured wholesale into Yahoo Image search - sod doing what Google has been struggling to master for years (build a spider that can "see" the images dotted around the web and try and catalogue them)...just get a monstrous volunteer army to get all new pictures and then do all the cataloguing for you!

And you know what? Yahoo image search (surprise surprise) yields much better results...clever b*stards... ;) I'm not annoyed though, far from it, one of my pictures is on page 2 for the staggeringly broad query "New York"...and page 1 for (the much more specific) "20 pound note"...must be doing something right... <:0