“Yahoo Image Search is serving over 300 million Flickr photos in its query results via a live feed from Flickr,” reports Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker, “so once an image is uploaded to a Flickr account, it’s available via Yahoo Image Search too.”  Baker compares that to just 3.7 million Flickr photos that are available through Google Image Search.

An added bit of niftiness in this new development: “The Flickr photos in Yahoo Search will be marked by Flickr account name, and searchers can click on the name to view and search all photos by that Flickr user.”

For example, the first result for “Csaba Csere” (the editor-in-chief of Car and Driver) is a photo from the user “dck47.”  Now, click on that name, and I’ll give you a moment to peruse dck47’s photos of a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera . . .

Right.  Back on topic.  Yahoo appears to have put a lot of effort into Flickr lately – in the past month, the photo-sharing site has added support for seven languages, addressed issues of censorship, and been named heir to Yahoo Photos’s throne.  The results are impressive.

There’s still room for improvement, however.  “Ideally, it would also be nice to also be able to search or rank images via tags and other attributes in Yahoo Image Search,” writes Baker.  And in a perfect world, that Lambo would be silver, not orange.

As always, my cell phone is always on at 425-205-1921. If you wanna show me a cool new toy, call me up!

Some cool new toys I saw tonight? A new Skype headset from Jawbone. A Hifi link for the iPod. Digital home automation software (that works with these switches and controls) from Echelon. Home automation is another big trend that we may see pick up in 2006. The controls are now cheap enough that I could afford them (and they are energy saving and let you do stuff that you couldn’t do before. For instance, when we got back from Europe we almost froze to death. Turns out it takes two hours to heat up our house fully after the interior temp goes down to the 30s. If we had a remote controllable thermostat we could have turned the heater on before we got home). Asus was showing off a Lamborghini laptop. Screaming performance. But hefty price (more than $3,000 they told us). And it’s no OQO. If you carried this around it’d hurt your back. iSee was showing off a cool device that you plug an iPod into. Turned your iPod into a video recorder. Here’s Doc Searls getting a look from ATO CFO Richard Wright.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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