The other day I was looking for pictures of people shopping.
To be more specific: A picture of women in a shopping situation, e.g. at a
sale, in a warehouse pulling down clothes. You know the scene. To find such a
picture I looked at Flickr, Corbis, Yahoo! Images, and Google Images. And I
did an interesting observation. Perhaps not novel to power users of Flicker,
and folks who study social tagging, but I never thought of it before.
It didn’t surprise me, that it was pretty difficult to find relevant material with Google and Yahoo! They provided a lot of ROT, but what they dig up for me was relevant considering the typical search terms a user in my situation would use: ‘shopping’, ‘mess’, ‘queue’, ‘women’, etc. Corbis was spot on in their results. Some was not exactly relevant, but clicking “Search by Keywords” would bring up even more relevant results. What was interesting was Flicker. When I searched here, I noticed that the results provided me with images showing situations where the photographer was out shopping. The search terms did not match the subject in the of picture.
I don’t know how to search on Flicker, if you are searching for what’s in the picture, and not for what the photographer was doing, when she/he took the picture, or how she/he interpreted his own role in that particular situation, where the picture was taken. Perhaps I don’t understand Flicker. I’m not a regular user. Perhaps I don’t know how to use Flicker search. But to me, Flicker tags are useless.
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