Finding Photos With 'Interestingness' on the Internet

Flickr is the "photo-sharing service" that Yahoo purchased earlier this year and they say they now have a new search system that will lead to smarter image surfing and discovery - not to mention, of course, far more fun.

How you ask? Well, the best way is to take a tour of Flickr's tens of millions of photos using this great new option on their site. Its called the "explore" link on the site's home page and you will soon get the idea. The system, which Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) calls "interestingness," uses a formula to analyse how users use the system and determine which photos people will find most interesting.

Be warned though, this could be addictive - the result feels more like a journey through the Web than browsing photos. Currently it adds about 250,000 images daily. The site's popularity seems to lie in the creative ways users can organize and share photos, using free-form word "tags" they can make up and search for later.

Can you explain just exactly what it is that Flickr does on the web?

Flickr, to use their own words, is the best way to store, sort, search and share your photos online. There is an absolutely huge mass of photos in the world, and Flickr providing a way to organise them, and for you and your friends and family to tell your stories about them.

If this interests you, probably the best way to learn about it is to upload some photos, explore the site, join some groups and make some friends. There is more information about Flickr, what its aims are and who is responsible on their About Page.

So how does this new "interestingness stuff" actually work?

It works pretty much along the same lines that Google does. Google invented a formula (what techies call an "algorithm") to rank Web pages based partly on how many other sites link to them. The Flickr people set about devising a method that quantifies a viewer's "behaviour" around each photo stored on its site. They count how many viewers clicked on a shot, how many clicked to the next shot in that series, how many looked at a particular photographer's other pictures, etc.

The Flickr site then analyses this information, along with the descriptive words people add to each photo, to figure out which it should present first when people search for a particular category or browse in a random manner.

Flickr say, they have "a wealth of information about how people are reacting to photos," they observe which ones people click on, which ones they make comments on, which ones they add to their favourites and so on.

Flickr's formula also factors in some of the more subtle factors as well, such as the relationship between who posted a photo and who commented on it. So, "if your mum comments favourably on your photo, it doesn't count for as much as if a complete stranger did.

Is there a cost associated with this site?

Flickr offers both premium and free accounts for sharing digital photos. They say there will always be a free version of Flickr. It will be limited in certain ways and you get more with your paid subscription. There is the option of upgrading to a Flickr Pro Account, for about fifty dollars per year.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au