Earlier this afternoon, we were horrified to find page after page of two searches produced Getty Images style stock photography. All the home shots, the weird shots, the budding amateur shots had been replaced with slick cliched shots you’d find over here.
For us, one of the joys of Flickr is the random nature of an image search fueled by the idiosyncrasies of user tagging. But page after page (we got to page 16) were full of posed shots.
We must suppose that Yahoo! has plans to make Flickr more of a image-resouce than an image pool and is therefore dumping stock images with their pre-existing tags into the library. Or Yahoo! thinks that users are more likely to buy ‘classy’ prints. Or maybe Yahoo! finds the real people a little too ugly.
Which would be a shame.
When we returned later to do the same search – parents – we couldn’t get the same results However, examination of the URLs for the earlier and later searches show differences in the URL.
Earlier search (with results that scared us)
Later search (with results we expected)
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
This is going to make me look very sad…although it didn’t take that long to work out (I like an investigative challenge!). It’s the same search results in both instances. But if you look just above the first image you have the choice to view in 3 ways – most relevant, most recent or most interesting. On your later search, the images are ranked by ‘most relevant’, which I take to mean the normal shots by normal people we all expect. The earlier search was ranked by ‘most interesting’, which seems to mean more stock-shot-y. Flickr’s rationale for ‘interestingness’ is here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/
August 10th, 2006 at 3:27 am
As Jon points out, these aren’t stock shots Piers. They are the pictures that rank highest on Flickr’s quirky interestingness algorithm. Flickr’s “Greatest Hits” if you will. Flickr’s membership actually contains quite a few professional and semi-professional photographers who post their portfolios for people to see (not buy). They are proud of their work and they want people to see it.
August 10th, 2006 at 6:58 am
thanks for your comments guys. ok… I know a lot of (great) photographers put their work up – but when we did the search it smacked of ‘cheese-factor’ – even if your case is true – someone at Flickr is ranking these shots deliberately and that person has awful taste…
August 10th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Also, if you look at the URL there’s the addition of “s=int&” at the beginning of the search string. Which, as everyone said above, includes interestingness.
August 10th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Piers Fawkes …
Frankly, what you’re saying is complete rubbish.
What you’ve done is effectively run two completely different searches [as others have already pointed out].
Your first search [with all that 'cheese-factor'] was sorting the results by “interestingness”, while the second was just your stock standard search – trying to return results based on the relavence to your search query.
Beyond that, Flickr’s “interestingness” is a completly automated process, effectively ‘ranking’photographs based on a number of different algorithims.
5 minutes research on what Flickr’s “interestingness” was, and how it actually ranks photographs would have shown you these links:
http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2005/08/the_new_new_thi.html
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/
NOTE:
“interestingness is a ranking algorithm based on user behavior around the photos taking into account some obvious things like how many users add the photo to their favorites and some subtle things like the relationship between the person who uploaded the photo and the people who are commenting (plus a whole bunch of secret sauce).”
AND
“There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.”
August 15th, 2006 at 6:20 am
Furthermore, in your article you’re using a copyrighted image [bad enough] without providing any attributation/link to its original author [even worse].
Did you gain permission from them before you used their work, or have you just “stolen” it instead?
August 15th, 2006 at 6:47 am