Yahoo Adds Flickr Creative Commons Images to Search

As Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer continues to use her Google experience to gradually tweak and enhance the overall Yahoo experience, a clearer picture of the company's new strategy is slowly coming into focus.

The latest change announced this week by Yahoo is a modification of its search engine functions that will now allow users to easily search for Flickr images tagged with the Creative Commons license.

Now when users enter a search term into Yahoo's main image search engine they have the option of selecting a "Labeled for Reuse" filter that will only show images Flickr users have indicated are available under various types of Creative Commons attribution licenses. For years the Creative Commons attribution license option has allowed visitors to reuse Flickr images by simply giving credit to the photographer, a valuable feature that has helped to grow the popularity of Flickr as other photo sites have fallen by the wayside.

Another component of the new Yahoo search feature is the ability to discover the names of the photographers within Yahoo's search results field by simply clicking a tiny "i" icon shown on the corner of all of "Labeled for Reuse" images. The reusable images also include a link back to the photographer's original Flickr photo stream, as well as a link to a detailed explanation of exactly what kind of Creative Commons license under which the image is offered. The new Yahoo images search feature is also optimized for tablets and mobile devices.

By integrating this simple function into its search system Yahoo not only seamlessly merges one of it most popular products into it main landing page, but also gives those who may have stopped using Yahoo as a search tool another reason to give the company's once popular search engine another try. According to a comScore report released in December, Google currently has 67 percent of the U.S. search market, with Microsoft sites holding steady at 16.2 percent, followed by Yahoo at just 12.1 percent.